If you are a teacher who is looking for insight into how to start the work on anti-bias and anti-racist education, Start Here, Start Now by Liz Kleinrock is the book for you. We have followed Liz Kleinrock on social media for years now and were super excited when she announced she had written a book last summer. Her book did not disappoint.

As a classroom teacher herself, Liz Kleinrock provides practical strategies that she knows will work. She also provides practical ways to implement each of her strategies into the classroom setting.

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Kids these days are so lucky! There so many great young adult (YA) books for them to choose from. Here are some of our favorites for realistic fiction and romance:

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Well, having a feature corner is always a nice design element in any space. In our classrooms, we created a gallery wall to highlight that area of the classroom. Just google gallery walls to get inspiration and ideas. Here are a few places to get cheap materials to make your own gallery wall:

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Showing videos in class is a great tool to assist students in understanding content at a deeper level. If you have purchased any of our literary response and analysis lessons from our Teachers Pay Teachers store, it may come as no surprise to you that we love using Flocabulary to amplify learning in our classrooms.

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Kids these days are so lucky! There so many great young adult (YA) books for them to choose from. Here are some of our favorites for adventure and fantasy/science fiction :

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The New York Times is one of the most recognized publications in the world. It also is a treasure trove of free resources for educators. If you teach middle school or high school and have not yet checked out the New York Times resources, you are missing out on a valuable resource.

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All teachers need to belong to ASCD (Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development). It is a community of educators who work together to improve education with administrators and teachers. While ASCD is mostly thought of as guides for people in educational leadership roles and administration, it is also very much geared toward improving classroom teachers. ASCD’s mission statement is “ASCD empowers educators to achieve excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.”

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This up and coming school year we are really going to have to pull out all the stops to get our students who currently show very little interest in reading… to give reading a try. One thing that we have found a lot of success with is having a huge selection of novels written in verse. Students will gravitate towards these novels because they seem “easier to read,” and they can feel a great sense of accomplishment when they finish the book. Here’s a little secret, while the books may seem “easier to read” they are extremely complex and often times they delve into very deep material. This deeper material may relate to some of the problems and hardships some students may be going through. Therefore students can connect with these novels on a deeper level.

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The beginning of the new school year is quickly approaching, and it is time to bust out our Cricut Explore Air to take your classroom decor to the next level.

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A quick lesson idea we wanted to share with you all was on a way we like to gamify our reading responses. We think it is a fun and interactive way for students to analyze the book that they are reading. We hope that by giving students several options to show their understanding of the book that they are reading (independently, in book clubs, or a whole class novel) that they will shine like the diamonds they are.

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I just finished reading Teaching for Deeper Learning by Jay McTighe and Harvey F. Silver. It is a teaching book on how to teach so that students thrive and learn at a deep level. Let me tell you, the title lives up to the name. Here are some of my takeaways:

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Let’s talk about compare and contrast note taking skills in this blog post. First and foremost, we as teachers know that comparing is a foundational thinking skill for students and is the foundation to learning more complex thinking such as problem solving, argumentation, and decision making. Basically, teaching students HOW to compare and contrast leads to huge gains in achievement.

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