The Best Scary Short Stories for Middle and High School To Teach Around Halloween
My favorite time of year is quickly approaching. Bust out the sweaters and tall boots. Get your Halloween decorations all sorted out. Start sipping everything apple cider and pumpkin spiced. And most of all, get your SpOoOoOoOoOky stories prepped and ready! There are some phenomenally engaging scary stories that are just right for the month of October. Not only are they just the right amount of creepy, they are also chock full of literary elements. Read on for our list of favorite Short stories to read during the month of October.
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Ages 9–12: The Make-or-Break Years for Girls’ Confidence—and How We Can Help
The tween years don’t have to break girls down. In fact, they can be the years that build them up. With love, support, and a little strategy, we can help girls grow into strong, self-assured teens who know they’re more than good enough just as they are.
Let’s meet them where they are—and remind them how powerful they’ve always been.
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5 Reasons to Use Exit Tickets In the Classroom
We L-O-V-E exit tickets because they are a great formative assessment tool that gives us a way to assess how well our students understand the material they are learning in class. The best part is that we can then use this data for adapting instruction to meet our students' needs the very next day. Exit tickets allow teachers to see where the gaps in knowledge are, what they need to fix, what students have mastered, and what can be enriched in the classroom.
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Want Better Readers? Start with Better Sentences
This post explores the powerful connection between sentence fluency and reading comprehension, inspired by Mike Schmoker’s article Improving Reading with Sentence Fluency. When students learn to write better sentences, they become stronger, more confident readers. We share practical insights and highlight our Engaging Syntax and Sentence Building Skills for Middle School resource—designed to boost both writing and reading fluency in a meaningful, engaging way.
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Teaching Note Creating and Summarizing Skills
We all want our students to learn deeply, but what does that look like? Understanding must be earned by the learner through active mental manipulation of higher order thinking skills. In our information saturated world, teachers are no longer dispensers of information, but rather need to become facilitators of helping students to understand information by directing active meaning making.
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📚 The 10 Books I'm Most Excited to Read This School Year (and Why You Should Be Too)
✨ This Year’s Must-Reads for Inspired Teaching ✨
Ready to reignite your passion for teaching? I’ve curated a list of 10 game-changing education books I can’t wait to read this school year—covering everything from the science of learning to media literacy, vocabulary instruction, and independent reading. Whether you're an ELA teacher, intervention specialist, or just hungry for smarter strategies, this list has something for you. Dive into mentor texts, unlock student engagement, and rediscover the power of clear, focused teaching. 📚
👉 [Read the full post for my top picks and how I plan to use them in the classroom.]
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Effective Social and Emotional Learning Mini-Lessons for Improved Academic Performance
9 Research-Backed Teaching Strategies That Boost Student Achievement
Robert Marzano is an educational researcher, and he focuses on effective teaching strategies. He says that the keys to school wide achievement are effective and research based teaching strategies, effective and timely feedback, and improving academic vocabulary.
Here are Marzano’s top 9 most effective teaching strategies:
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Mastering the Art of Inferring: Engaging Middle School Reading Strategies and Fun Mystery Games
Do your students ever feel like they need a detective's hat and magnifying glass to understand their reading assignments? Well, you're in luck because teaching them the art of inferring can turn every reading session into an exciting mystery to solve! 🕵️♀️🔍
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Will AI Replace Teachers? What Every Educator Needs to Know
Wondering if AI will replace teachers? Discover how AI is transforming education—and why the human role in the classroom is more vital than ever.
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