Teacher Resources

Once you determine some higher order questions using the resource from last week, increase cognitive engagement while integrating movement using these simple strategies!  Install the Brisk Teaching extension to quickly generate leveled texts, create quizzes, and even develop presentations for you! Using the Interactive Language wall with mentor sentences in my class to improve student writing in only 5-10 minutes daily. After doing a few lesson planning sessions, I wanted to share some EL strategies that could be useful to integrate into your lessons and provide you with a list of strategies to choose from that apply best to the lesson you are teaching and the needs of your students.  

In order to elicit cognitive engagement from students the teacher needs to plan lessons that question their thinking so here are some questions that could be used at each level. Print this sheet and select one question to focus on that week to increase the DOK questioning when possible or use while lesson planning to preplan those rigorous questions! Remember that if students aren't practicing a skill, they will lose it. 99Math is a free website to support math fluency where you can select specific skills to work on. As you begin teaching writing The Writing Revolution Templates can be used to push students to the next level with instruction(TWR resources folder). These number sense routines will help to increasing students' number sense while integrating cognitive engagement strategies. They are broken down by standard so consider how they might be used included in your daily or weekly routines.

Now that Back to School Night is over with and you had an initial meeting with parents, keep that relationship positive with some of these ideas! You are with your students for a major portion of their day and parents are trusting you with the little humans that mean the most to them. Setting up the gradebooks in Aeries can be tricky the first few times through because there are so many different options. This is a screencast of how I set up my gradebooks when I was in the classroom. Remember to take a look at your Essential Elements of Core Curriculum (EECC) for grading recommendations or review this grading systems PD to be thoughtful about what goes into your gradebook. This proactive step can alleviate tough conversations as the year progresses. When beginning writing instruction, it is a good idea to start with the fundamentals and teach students your expectations without assuming they should already know it. Here are some paragraph writing templates that you can use to strengthen student writing. Managing student behaviors by establishing restorative practices helps students to learn from their mistakes, so take look at how simple that could be in your room. 

 With Back to School Night looming over you, here are some tips to make your night positive with parents!1st-8th grade students can begin taking the i-ready diagnostic #1 this week, beginging with reading. Here are some helpful reminders for administering the diagnostic. Providing sentence stems is a simple accommodation for subpopulations and the class as a whole. They can be posted in your room or given to students to use as a recourse for both written and oral language support in any subject area!  As you dive into curriculum this first full week of instruction, remember to incorporate movement throughout the day. This phase of year is filled with a lot of teacher voice as you are explaining your expectations, so use this four corners activity in the moments where you need to get students up and moving. Using Which One Doesn't Belong is a great way to get students to have low risk discussions while learning to justify their reasoning. You can begin with non-curricular images and eventually lead into content specific examples.

Happy first "official" week at work! During the first few weeks of the year it is imperative that you are creating, teaching, and reinforce your classroom expectations, routines, and procedures. If you are at a loss with where to start or are looking for some ways to freshen up what you have done in the past, then my advice to you is to download TikTok (advice I NEVER saw myself giving) and follow @Teachthenseetheworld. She gives tons of advice for effective classroom management and I couldn't agree more with everything she says! Another tip that comes from the Tok...Bulk creating items with Canva! I wish I knew this hack at the start of each school year because I can't tell you how much time I spent typing each individual student name over and over again! I included some writing resources for both you and your students at the beginning of the year. Lastly, here are some helpful templates that you can use to make your life easier while planning and organizing for the year.