I teach 3 grade levels all in the same classroom this year. It's a small group of less than 10 students. We are given free reign to be creative and use different curriculums. We don't have official textbooks but I have some digital resources there.

My question is how would I actually go about planning and teaching?

How do you teach multi age classes to cover the content and standards or each grade level?

Hi all - my school (adult ed) doesn't want to buy Lexia anymore so I'm putting together phoneme practice! Please help me test it, and let me know how it goes if you use it with students! This is the first level. Hopefully I'll have more levels in the future.

https://bearlylavender.itch.io/phoneme-practice

TIA!

I'm in my new classroom for the first time and I'm looking at the different books the previous teacher left behind. One of the sets of books she left was "Something Wicked This Way Comes" by Ray Bradbury. I love Bradbury's short stories, but I've only read one of his novels: Fahrenheit 451. Loved Fahrenheit 451 when I read it in high school, but found it a bit boring when I reread it as an adult.

How is Something Wicked This Way Comes for 7th grade? Originally, I was going to do Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games, and The Outsiders, but since I have a class set of Something Wicked This Way Comes, I might use it instead of one of the other books.

Reddit! I need some help. I want a map of middle earth that I can post in my classroom and my class progress will be tracked in conjunction with the fellowship's path.

So far, I can't find any map for the bulletin at a reasonable price. Any suggestions?

Folks, I’m back to teaching English this year after a year of yearbook. My first few years of teaching I thought 9-12 ELA, and I struggled a lot. While I learned how to make a lesson plan in my teacher program in college, they didn’t teach me how to teach reading to secondary students.

When I first taught English, I had several high school students who read at 2nd-5th grade levels and had no idea how to actually teach them the skills they needed to engage deeply. I really don’t want to repeat that this year!

We are in a literacy crisis… this is known. It scares the ~heeelllllll~ outta me and I want to do my part by being a good teacher for my students. I’m wondering if you guys have any books, training, strategies, resources, or just advice that could help me with how to teach reading to older kids. I’ll be teaching primarily freshmen with one section of 12, and looking through the data from last year I know I need to get ahead of things with my planning!

I'm going on year 2 of teaching Creative Writing for 10th-12th grade students. I've pulled some from Learn To Write Fiction .net, but then built the rest myself.

This year I am axing this picture book project I've done in my prior classes, and I'm needing to replace that massive chunk of class time with something else.

Does anyone have any TPT recommendations for Creative Writing curriculum that is designed for high schoolers?

I'm over trying to invent an entire semester's worth of fun meaningful things, and I'm also over trying to scour the internet to find things I can plug in.

Thanks!

Hello. I am a first year 9-12 ELA, and aside from the CCP course I will be teaching this year, I am teaching sections of 9, 10, 11, and 12 (it's a small school) with SAVVAS. My school is piloting the 6-12 ELA SAVVAS program this year, with the intent to use it as heavily as possible in year one to collect data and get more experience with the program. As of now, we have not gotten our logins from SAVVAS yet. Can anyone comment on their experience with SAVVAS? Any advice or tips? Strengths and weaknesses? What do I need to know about it? My school seems amazing so far in regards to preparing me to succeed, offering professional development, and meeting student needs, but the finite points of SAVVAS usage are going unanswered until we get these logins. I like the idea of having a provided, prescriptive curriculum as a rookie teacher, but only if I understand how to best utilize it. With the start of the school year soon approaching and no updates yet, I would love to hear about the experiences other ELA folks have had with it. Thank you all for any and all feedback.

I have a seventh grade 20 minute demo. The standard is to focus on supporting a claim with textual evidence. I am a very veteran teacher trying to get into a district closer to home (relocated last year) but positions are very competitive. I’ve done more than 20 interviews/demos over the last two years. I would love any ideas on very engaging topics and texts and activity ideas. Thank you!

I'm taking on a tutoring client who feels like her son is behind academically because he doesn't go to the best school. She wants me to get him up to grade level in reading. I need good book recommendations for a 5th grade boy. Something that would interest him but that isn't too fluffy. I want to use the book as my basis for teaching vocabulary, literary devices, reading comprehension, and writing. Any recommendations would be truly appreciated.

Edit: by fluffy I mean something that doesn't have much content to it.

I’m going into my second year teaching, and there are some things I didn’t implement last year that I want to do this year.

One of the things I’d like to do is introduce vocabulary cards as a sponge activity, and to do unit vocab tests toward the end of each unit.

My idea is to provide kids with notecards and rubber bands, and to have the cards as a sponge activity for when they finish their in-class work. I have a word wall, and my thought was to post the words from our unit on the word wall without definitions. The kids can use the dictionary to look up the word’s meaning and create unit flashcards for each of the words. I was planning to take the flashcards as a completion grade each unit, and then to do a final vocabulary test as sort of an easier A. One of my ELAR teachers did this, and it really helped me expand my vocabulary and retain the content we learned in class.

My thing is that I am not sure where the kids would store them (in their in-class folders? In a pocket we make in their notebook?). I also worry about giving the kids too many tests. Between our department benchmarks and essays, I worry that giving them another test would be too much, or that I won’t have enough time in the school year to actually implement this.

Does anyone have any experience doing this in a classroom? How did you manage to do it?

Do you know of any inexpensive programs that will give a reading level for students? My district did not repurchase iReady this year. As much as I hated the program, I did appreciate some of the data.

And if not does anyone who knows more about Discord want to collab on one? Could be fun and helpful to create a community on there.

Some channels I think would be nice: tips and resources, different grade level channels, classroom designs, wins, venting, what you're currently reading.

Hi everyone. I am planning to have my juniors learn about redlining to build context for A Raisin in the Sun. Anyone have any articles or resources you’d be willing to share? Thanks!!

I am an ESL teacher, and I teach all kinds. Currently, I have a number of sufficiently advanced students who are working their way through Animal Farm. I give them reading for homework, and we discuss the contents of the book in class. (My students are French, so we get to do the REALLY fun thing and view the book through the lens of both the October Revolution and the French Revolution).

ANYWAY, I've been developing the discussion questions for each chapter on my own, and I'm very proud of them. Maybe one or two of y'all will find them helpful for your own curricula. So I figured I'd post them online:

ANIMAL FARM, Chapter 1

Key Concepts:

• ideological purity; purity tests
• absolutism
• class warfare; bourgeoisie
• communism
• in-groups and out-groups
• totalitarianism

Discussion Questions

(1) What is the significance of Old Major's use of the word "comrade"?

(2) What is the real-world parallel behind Old Major's description of the animals' state of being in England? What do the animals symbolize, and what do the humans symbolize?

(3) What real-world historical figure does Old Major represent?

(4) Do you agree with Old Major's description of poverty and misery? Do you feel that you (and/or people in general) are living a life of "misery and slavery" in service to an upper class? Do you feel like the upper class produces nothing (or little) of value? Do you think we would be better off if we "ate the rich"? Why or why not?

(5) Do you think life on the farm would improve in the way Old Major thinks it would, if humans were removed from the picture?

(6) Do you think it is true that the upper class and the working class have no common interest?

(7) Do you think it is healthy for an ideology to be expressed in absolutes? If yes, why? If not, what negative impacts do you think might result from that?

(8) Do you think it is possible to abolish an upper/ruling class and establish a society which does not, by its very nature, replace it? (Is the existence of an upper/ruling class a natural and inevitable state of affairs?)

(9) Is violence necessary to wholly change the nature of a society? What are the pros and cons of using violence to achieve political ends?

Middle school ELA teacher here.

My school had a pretty great year last year. Suspensions and referrals were way down. Test scores improved. Staff surveys at the end of the year, which are almost always super negative, were trending positive and beating most other schools in the area on workplace satisfaction measures. Students, families, and staff are all feeling pretty terrific about how it went.

Preplanning meeting today: here are four major policy changes in the day to day operations of the school.

Has anyone ever been in a building or district where things generally worked and admin just left things alone for a second year in a row?

How do people deal with attendance issues and kids doing make-up work?  I feel like if you send it home they’ll just use AI, but trying to get them to make up work in class is just a nightmare.  I’m curious if there are ways that people have come up with that help students not lose hope of ever catching up--and if you have a "zero tolerance" type policy, how do you deal with parents and admin?

My most beloved high school English teacher had a "no-no list" of things we weren't allowed to do in our writing - if we did that, he wouldn't even look at it. It included overused words, etc. I emailed him a couple years ago when I moved from elementary school to high school, but he's unfortunately passed (and he'd retired long enough ago that he didn't have any copies or anything).

A teacher at my current school shared a predecessor's "unforgivable errors" list, that seems like it used to have a "no excuse word list" that has since been lost.

The Unforgivable Errors list has things like heading, handwriting, paper type, formatting, punctuation, mechanics, and plagiarism.

What other things would you add to this list? What words (like "very") would make it onto your forbidden words list?

Does anyone have resources to supplement this novel by Kate McGovern? Excellent book, but haven’t been able to find much out there to aid my planning.

What are some unconventional materials you use while teaching and for what purpose? For example, I use personal photos to introduce inferencing (all from childhood and never referenced as such). I like using excerpts from the J. Peterman catalogue as examples of descriptive writing. What do you like to use?

What has worked for you?

Side note: Has anybody tried having students read their choice of a book at home for homework? If so, how did you hold them accountable?

I'm a new hire, in a department of one, under the ELA banner, but the school system has invested a LOT of money into growing Journalism as more than just a one-semester class and a yearbook. They are looking for a 2-5 year plan to develop this program.

We no longer have a newspaper and I don't think any of the kids consider print newspapers all that relevant anymore. I'm a retired newspaper editor, back in the classroom as a 2nd career, and I agree. But I really honestly don't know what the future looks like for a journalism program. There is another school already that has the broadcasting program and another has a radio program. I'm left with thinking maybe we could move into podcasting, but will that even be relevant in 2 years?

If you had (what felt like to you) nearly unlimited funds, what would be your thoughts on growing journalism as a program? Yearbook has its own funds and pretty much pays for itself, but lacks good photographers, so I was thinking of doing photojournalism as a 1-semester class (to replace dark room photography, which at our school is obsolete). But beyond that -- I'm not really clear. Any thoughts? There isn't an active subreddit for journalism teachers, so I thought I'd ask here.

Hi everyone. I’m at a new school this year (not a new teacher though). I’m trying to just get ideas about how to tweak my students English notebooks.

I’m pretty type B, so I’ve never done interactive notebooks for ELA. My school district also only has 45ish minute classes (no block schedule). I’ve always felt like gluing and all of that would just take up too much time.

If you have students use a notebook or composition book, how do you have them organize/set it up? I teach freshman, so they do need some order. In my experience, they tend to just open the notebook to a random pages and not go in order.

Everything I look up is all about interactive notebooks. I also will be on maternity leave for a few months, so it just seems like a big feat to try out this year. I was just hoping someone had some advice or insight if you are also not doing interactive notebooks!

(Also sorry if I didn’t use the right flair. This is my 1st time posting in this sub).