4/5th ELA

Take Your Fifth & Sixth Grade Writers From "Blah" to BRILLIANT! - Thrive in Grade Five

Hey Friends! What is your favorite part of your day? Without a doubt, it is literacy centers for my students and I! They love to work co...

When teaching procedural writing I love to use mentor texts with my kindergarten and first grade students. Read this post for some of my favorite mentor texts for procedural writing.

In upper grade classrooms, students spend a great deal of time responding to the texts they read. Over the years I have found that no matter what grade level I teach, students have a difficult time writing thorough and meaningful reading responses. At the start of every year my students need quite a bit of guidance when writing their responses. One of the best ways that I have found to teach students to write meaningful responses is by providing them with sentence frames. I like to encourage...

Effectively focus on the basics of Narrative Writing by reading April Smith's suggested mini lessons. #narrativewriting #writininginstruction #3rd #4th #5th #Dialoguewriting #Setting #Characterwriting

Expanding Sentences Anchor Chart and Mini-Lesson

In this post, I offer a 90-minute literacy block schedule that can be used in kindergarten, first, and second-grade classrooms. The literacy block is broken up into whole group phonics instruction, small group instruction, and whole group language comprehension. I explain what skills should be taught in each part of the literacy block and leave you with a FREE downloadable template to help you plan your 90-minute literacy block.

Get 5 tips for How To Teach Opinion Writing & details about the Opinion Writing Units that will help you bring Opinion Writing into your kindergarten, first, or second-grade classrooms!

Teaching your students to differentiate between the different kinds of text structures is so essential! It helps them understand the nonfiction passages and materials they read, be able to identify biases in the texts they read, and determine the author's purpose. But, how do you teach them all the different text structures?! Check out these simple ideas for using mentor texts for teaching text structures RIGHT NOW!