February is a short month with a LOT to fit in and it seems to me that Black History month gets the short end of the stick since this month quickly passes by. Over the past few years, I have really tried to put some serious effort into diversifying my classroom (and home) library. Today, […]

How do you teach character change within a story? By this time of the year, my first graders are easily able to identify the main character. They are also able to give a few character traits (with text evidence) to describe that main character. Now, is when I really want students to focus on how […]

Cause & Effect! Students have been unknowingly learning about causes and effects their entire lives. “Eat your veggies and you will get dessert.” “Put those toys back and you can play with something else.” They learn that their actions have effects. When put into a story context, we are teaching students to focus on two […]

Comprehension! It is the most important part of reading, isn’t it? I am always looking for ways to help my students with their comprehension and providing stopping points to think aloud has helped tremendously. The conscious act of checking in it a strategy many students use to help them determine when they might need to […]

Asking questions while reading is such an important skill for students to learn. There are many activities to help students practice questioning, but I find the best way is to through reading and modeling.   “Thinking is not driven by answers but by questions.” (Paul & Elder 2000)   When teaching students to ask questions […]

I wanted to take some time today to share (3) different retelling strategies that work with my first grade students. Hopefully you find them useful as well! At the beginning of the year, I teach my students the 3 ways to read a book: read the illustrations, read the text, and retelling the story. These […]

Do you use Reader’s Workshop in your first grade classroom?!   It was an absolute game-changer for me when I started researching and implementing Reader’s Workshop and its benefits in a primary classroom. I really wanted to get away from the overwhelming prep of literacy centers and I had my “aha!” moment when I walked […]

Reading something fluently is the ability to read it at an appropriate rate with the correct intonation. It is when you read as though you are speaking conversationally, without any struggle. Fluency is essential to reading comprehension. A few weeks ago, I shared this image on my instagram page: Go ahead and read that. I bet […]

Black history month is right around the corner and there are SO many important people and topics to cover for my primary students to get even a partial grasp of the civil rights movement. After teaching about Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission and journey to my first graders over the years, I know that they […]