Sunday Showcase: Teach Mama

My hard drive was blown on my computer but now we are up and running!

On another note, I wanted to get back to my Sunday Showcase. This week Teach Mama had a very important post that I wanted to share!

Teach Mama is a great website that I subscribe to through my Google Reader. She always has great posts and inspiring ideas! She is a Reading Specialist and former High School English teacher. Her love of reading and teaching drive the site. The site is packed full, you should certainly take time to investigate it thoroughly!
The post I wanted to share, in particular, has very important information for parents. As a teacher, I always spent time sharing this same information with my students' parents. The post entitled,

learning during read-alouds: 5 things never to say to emerging readers

is something that should be shared with parents and caregivers the world through! I taught a Literacy Night every year teaching these same 5 things never to say to readers. No parent says them to hurt their child, but rather to help. They just do not know that what they are saying and doing is not helping at all.

One way I explained this to parents, was to tell them that their job was to facilitate reading and not teach reading. Their job was to help their children love books and reading. We all know that we do not learn a new skill under duress, the same can be said for reading. We need to make it fun, exciting, a source of entertainment as well as informative. Check out this posts as well as her other informative posts!

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December Project-Based Learning: Sharing Through the Season

Every classroom teacher knows how crazy the classroom can be from Halloween to winter break. There are fun community activities, holidays, and a lot of excitement! I learned instead of trying to fight against the hype, to channel the excitement into projects! This time of year the necessary elementary classroom routines become dull and have a harder time keeping student interest. So what better time to introduce project-based learning! I feel strongly about learning about the culture and traditions of others. In my classroom, over the years I have learned traditions celebrated in holidays I was familiar with and traditions from holidays I was not aware of previously. This project was created to provide a way for students to share their personal family traditions during this exciting time being all-inclusive and without making religious statements. Project Objective: The students will each select and read a picture book to the class asking questio...

Play to Write- Week 3

We participating in a Wednesday Play Group called Play to Write over at Cherrios and Lattes . This is week 3- Write/Spell Your Name. We started this week's practice with some name tracing. Cherrios and Lattes provides the printable for some dotted letters. She suggested doing rainbow writing with this sheet. I showed Jacob but he was more interested in writing all the Jacobs. I started by modeling on the first name. Then I held his hand and we did it together. Finally I let him do the last three on his own with only my verbal prompts. He took this very seriously and was very proud of himself! I was surprised at how much he liked doing this activity. He has a long way to go but he did pretty well! One thing I had to repeat was not to go around the o and a more than once. He wanted to go around and around. This is an activity that I think he will want to do again! The next activity was Missing Letter Name Practice. We started by singing a little song I sing fo...

Name Writing Practice

Jacob did a little name writing practice today. He was asked to trace the dotted lines to write letters for his name. This is good practice with spelling as well. I had him say each letter as he wrote the letter. As you can see he is very choppy and not exactly on the dotted lines. His motor skills are not quite sharp enough yet to be able to hold the crayon and he especially loses control as he works on towards the end. We also did a Missing Letter Name Practice. Both of these ideas came from Cherrios and Lattes ' Play to Write, Write to Read. These are good ways to practice names and writing. He gets very angry if he thinks he made a mistake. See the scribbling. I have to reinforce that it is ok to make a mistake and that everyone makes mistakes but we just keep trying. Practice is the only way to get better. When this happens I cannot help but think of my former students that did the very same thing and proceeded to throw fits and give up. I hope to help Jacob ge...

Structured Play

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