Just dropping in to share  August's Interactive Read Aloud Lessons  for the following books:  Those Shoes, What Do You Do With a Problem?, The Dot, and The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes.  I love incorporating Interactive R ead Alouds, because they allow us to teach a broad range of standards.  You can't cover an ELA standard once, and expect your students to automatically master it.  These allow you to continue to continually revisit it.  If you would like to learn more about Interactive Read Alouds, this article from Reading Rockets does a great job of explaining its components and the WHY.  You will find that each week’s read aloud below will cover several standards, but I focus more heavily on a specific one each week while also including the others.   Each read aloud is designed to cover five days but can be condensed to four depending on your schedule.    All of my read aloud plans include anchor charts, posters, a daily lesson plan, assessing and advancing questions...
Do you struggle remembering every single component of your lesson?   Does your administration conduct unannounced observations?  In Tennessee, we have unannounced observations as a part of our evaluation model.  So, I feel like I really need to be extra prepared each day to meet each component of our evaluation rubric.  Not only am I thinking about a possible observation, I am also thinking about high-quality, engaging instruction for my students.  The way I now structure my lessons promotes much deeper thinking opportunities, effective partner talk, and meaningful tasks.  To make sure I hit all components necessary for high-quality instruction, I plug everything into PowerPoint lessons .  It's a little extra time up front, but it will save your sanity throughout the week.  I will, however, include some time-saving tips at the end of the post.  I'll take you through a sample lesson of my Interactive Read Aloud, since that is what I plan for my grade level. I always ...
Morning Meeting is one of my favorite parts of the day.  We have to start our day with it, or our day just isn't quite the same.  Morning meeting is the time in which we start our day on a positive note, share with one another, go over what's happening that day, review rules and expectations, complete calendar, sing, and spiral review.  It's packed full of fun! I have morning meeting files for ten months of the year, August through May.  I will take you through the May Morning Meeting just to give you an idea of what we do in my classroom. I get lots of questions about how I display my morning meetings, since they are digital files.  I do not have a SMART board, sadly.  I just have a PC and a projector that projects onto a regular screen.  My files are all PowerPoint files, so they are easily editable.  There are slides that you may want to write on.  So, what you can do is freeze the image with your remote and write on it that way if you have a Mobi like...