By Elaine Magliaro
Author of Things to Do, a picture poetry book
I was an elementary school teacher for more than thirty years. I loved sharing poetry with my students! I also loved teaching them how to write poetry. One kind of poem my students enjoyed writing was a “things to do” list poem.
When I write my […]
Do you remember when you were a kid, and every phase of your life seemed to last forever? You couldn’t imagine that your current situation would ever come to an end. This can be wonderful if it’s summer vacation, but can be a real trial for a struggling reader.
Many of our students who have reading […]
At Booksource, we know that reading levels can serve as a helpful tool for educators. Reading levels—including Guided Reading Level, Lexile Level, DRA Level and Reading Recovery Level—can make it easy to identify characteristics of reading proficiency at each grade level and match students to texts that can be read with success.
A Quick and Easy […]
Balanced literacy. What does it mean?
If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find many different definitions that may end up confusing you more than comforting you. But there are common threads in any explanation of the practice.
No matter how you define it, balanced literacy always involves the integration of real books within multiple threads […]
On January 24, 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California, sparking one of the largest migrations in America’s history. Americans and immigrants flocked to California by the thousands, hoping to strike it rich as miners in the gold fields or as merchants selling supplies.
Although it seems like ages ago, students can find […]
Albert Marrin is a well-regarded author of juvenile nonfiction. Having penned over three dozen titles, he is not only prolific but also award-winning, and clearly dedicated to bringing history to life for his readers.
I recently spent some time with three of Marrin’s titles: A Volcano Beneath the Snow, FDR and the American Crisis and Thomas […]
Reading aloud to young children has always been a delight, but I must plead guilty to spending too many years focusing on fiction-based read alouds. I was afraid that informational selections couldn’t possibly hold the attention of my ever-so-wiggly elementary students. But how wrong I was!
Once I began to experiment with informational read alouds from […]
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
~ Dyer 2009
From the very first moment we started working together as math and reading specialists, we intently focused on our respective content areas. As we planned and worked with teachers individually around reading or math lessons, we never quite saw […]
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. -Pablo Picasso
October 25, 2016 marks the 135th anniversary of the prolific Pablo Picasso’s birth, long ago in Spain. Picasso was a formally educated artist, trained in prestigious, elite art schools at a very young age at his father’s […]
The 2016 presidential election is giving people a lot to talk about. Some elections slide by without much controversy, but not this one. As an educator thinking about teaching the 2016 presidential election, I’ve had to pause. Could I successfully hide my own political views? What would conversations in my classroom look like? Would students erupt […]
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