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Building Back to School Tools: 4 Ideas for Teachers

For the next few weeks, I’ll be linking up with #TeacherMom and her Building Back to School series of helpful tools for classroom teachers. Read the first post by #TeacherMom HERE Today, I’m going to write about four essential tools that I used every year when I was teaching ESL

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Monday Musings: Happy Birthday!

I’m one year old!  Well, my TpT store is, anyway.  (Does that make me 33.8 Celsius?)  This week marks the one-year anniversary of the opening of my store and that got me thinking about how birthdays are celebrated in other cultures and what the impact can be on schools. When

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Monday Musings: Let It Rain!

I was thinking about the weather yesterday.  It was hot but not humid and I didn’t turn the air conditioner on.  It’s also been thundering a lot late at night, with frequent flashes of lightning.  Here in Arizona, it’s the monsoon season.  But a colleague from back East said she

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4 Ways to Use SitSpots with Older Students

It’s always exciting to win a prize in a raffle but to be honest, I was a little disappointed when I learned that what I’d won at the recent TeachersPayTeachers Blogger Meet Up was a product for kindergartners, something called SitSpots.  Kindergarten was the grade I found most challenging and

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Monday Musings: Raffles and Ruminations

I’ve attended lots of conferences and they all are organized in a similar fashion: a keynote address to all participants, breakout sessions devoted to specific aspects of the conference theme or focus, networking opportunities, raffles of some sort and, depending on the size of the conference, exhibits by publishers and

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Summer Reading: Book Recommendation #5

I took a break last Thursday and wrote a post about the Fourth of July and Poldark, my new favorite TV show, but I have a few more books to recommend so this week I’m resuming the series. (This post contains affiliate links. That means that I make a small

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Monday Musings: Working, Playing, Learning

Playing versus learning: Is that a dichotomy?  A lot of people seem to think it is, as evidenced by the movement–which in itself is a paradox, since they’re not actually getting up and moving around but rather sitting quietly in chairs at desks–to get children in kindergarten reading and writing

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Independence Day, Poldark, and ELLs

What do the Fourth of July and Poldark have in common?  And what does Poldark have to do with teaching English Language Learners?  Well, I can think of a couple answers to both questions.  So in this post, I will take a break from writing book recommendations and discuss something

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Monday Musings: Relaxation and Rejuvenation

This was my first year not being in a classroom but had I been teaching, last Friday would have been my final day of the school year, due to making up all the snow days in the winter.  After the excitement and chaos of the last week of school, it

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Summer Reading: Book Recommendation #4

Time for a change.  I mean that literally, in the sense that this week I am not recommending another literacy-related book and I also mean that in the sense that the demographics of the students attending U.S. public schools is changing. This past school year was the first time that

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Summer Reading: Book Recommendation #3

In last week’s blog post, I recommended a book that discussed how to teach reading: From Reader to Reading Teacher offers a theoretical background for designing and implementing a reading program.  This week, I’d like to stay with the topic of literacy since reading and writing are essential skills across

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