Teacher Clip Art, Literary Resources, Classroom Ideas
I’m always looking for new ways to integrate social skills into my teaching.
Poetry is a fun new way to teach social skills!
This year, we decided to integrate social skills in our teaching with our Poem of the Week! Each week we focus on a different social skill and use it to read, write, discuss, sort, and so much more!
Here are some of our poetry topics:
For Carpet Time:
Hands In My Lap, I Can Raise My Hand, Meet At The Carpet, Ready To [Read More…]
Phonics centers are the core of my teaching when it comes to emergent readers. As an early literacy teacher for over 25 years, I’ve learned a thing or two about how children successfully acquire and practice reading skills. In Kindergarten, our focus is letter sounds. That is the foundation of decoding letters as symbols for sounds we hear in language.
Once students can tell you which letter makes which sound, we are ready to move on to isolating those sounds. The [Read More…]
I’ve recently started to incorporate online read-aloud stories to my daily routine, and discovered there are so many great books online out there!
Howard Wigglebottom Stories
My favorite find in the last year is the site dedicated to the Howard Wigglebottom stories. These cute animations focus on character building, social and emotional development, and lots of other essential ingredients for the primary classroom.
And guess what? They are all animated on one website! We use one story each morning as a springboard for [Read More…]
How do you teach letter sounds?
Teaching letter sounds can be tricky, and takes a LOT of daily practice. I try to use as many different approaches as possible so that I am addressing the many different learning styles in my classroom. I use songs, videos, books, small group intervention, and whole group lessons.
Here are some ideas for you to try!
LETTER SOUNDS: VIDEOS
Below are some videos that my students enjoy.
Click on any picture to watch the video with your class!
Jack Hartmann [Read More…]
This post is all about teaching reading, and it also contains a FREE alphabet printing activity for you to download!
You may have seen my recent post about my HUGE teaching dilemma last year: a new teaching partner who had no experience with teaching primary math! How could I make sure that my new partner stayed on track without spending HOURS talking about math lessons, planning, intervention and reporting?
My solution? I had the idea to make a whole year of paperless daily [Read More…]
I had a BIG teaching dilemma last year.
My teaching partner was new to first grade and didn’t know ANYTHING about teaching math at this level. I needed to keep my math lessons organized through the school year, and I was worried our math lessons would fall behind or not be as effective when I wasn’t there.
So the question was…. How could I make sure that my new partner stayed on track without spending HOURS on the phone talking about math lessons, [Read More…]
Welcome to the Social Skills Ideas Bank!
The Social Skills Idea Bank is a series of related posts, each dedicated to sharing strategies for teaching a particular social skill.
As teachers, our strength lies in sharing our ideas, experiences and strategies!
This is a growing list, and you are invited to contribute in the comments section. We hope you will, because there’s nothing like a good idea shared between teachers to make our jobs easier.
In this post you will find lots of simple ways to encourage students [Read More…]
Social Emotional Learning, or S.E.L., has always been a critical element of a successful classroom. However, it is being taught more explicitly in recent years. As primary teachers, we have probably already been doing many things to foster and encourage SEL in our classroom. Intuitively, we create a warm, inclusive environment. We help students to learn routines that are essential in a group learning environment. We help students to navigate peer conflict that may arise.
How can we go even even [Read More…]
Welcome to the Social Skills Ideas Bank!
The Social Skills Idea Bank is a series of related posts, each dedicated to sharing strategies for teaching a particular social skill.
As teachers, our strength lies in sharing our ideas, experiences and strategies!
This is a growing list, and you are invited to contribute in the comments section. We hope you will, because there’s nothing like a good idea shared between teachers to make our jobs easier.
This post is about simple ways to teach about kindness in the [Read More…]
WHY USE BOOK COMPANIONS?
Book companions allow teacher’s to use one story to practice a number of core reading and writing skills.
In my classroom, it ensures that I continue to use literature to explore things like story structure, sequencing, character traits, letter writing formats, comprehension and more. We can also have fun with stories using partner plays, comic book writing, and art projects.
Using book companions keeps all the lessons focused and organized, makes my planning easier, and makes assessment simple because [Read More…]
