Do your young learners have poetry journals?! Mine do and we love them.   The main question I have been asked in the past is what I put inside my journals and I created a resource to help answer that question. Most of the poems in our poetry journals are phonics poems, but I also […]

This past week we launched our writer’s workshop lessons!   I use my writer’s workshop units throughout the year, but before we dive into small moments we talk about what Writer’s Workshop looks like in our first grade classroom.   This poster is hanging in our classroom and we go through each of these bullet points throughout […]

Last year, I taught how to make inferences for quite some time. With such an emphasis on close reading, I wanted my students to read between the lines, to dig deeper, and to find out the answer to the question, “what is the author really trying to say?!”   I spent a lot of time […]

If you have been following my blog for awhile, you may know that teaching writing is my FAVORITE subject to teach in 1st grade. I have a feeling I would love it in kinder or 2nd grade as well. My students’ writing gets longer, more detailed, more persuasive, more informative, more interesting to the reader. […]

Do your first graders love Mo Willems? Mine sure do and we have been learning alllllllll about Mo Willems this week! Pigeon, Elephant & Piggie, and Knuffle Bunny… my students are loving being immersed in all things Mo. We started the author study on Monday learning a little bit about Mo Willems and then throughout […]

This teacher has a BIG smile on her face for lots of reasons. First and foremost, THIS: Parker and I found out last Tuesday that we were having a BOY!! Our sweet little Theo will be arriving in early October and I literally have not stopped smiling since we found out. 🙂 🙂 🙂 The […]

Do you LOVE Pigeon?! Do your kids LOVE Pigeon?! I cannot get enough of that silly pigeon and my kids agree. He is a read-aloud favorite and my kids begggg for me to read a pigeon book at least once a day! I’m not a pigeon-only type of gal either. I think all three Knuffle […]

After a little phonics screening this past week, I realized a good chunk of my kiddos were STUCK on blends. They were having trouble reading both beginning and ending consonant blends. I created a fun little game which I introduced on Friday and my kids loved it! Here it is in action:       […]