Sending home classroom parent permission forms typically occurs at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, no one teaches you how to do it. In college they don’t help teachers learn any of the really important stuff, like how to operate the copier or run a laminator, and I know they never told me how […]
Book Report Badness: Reader Q & A
Book Report Badness: The Trouble with Summarizing There is always some tension between teaching a subject and making sure that we don’t turn the subject into a source of pain and drudgery. It’s the art of teaching (and parenting, really). I’ve written about it before when I talked about the role and importance of process. […]
2019 Year in Review
Do you love looking back on what you’ve done, where you’ve been, and think about where you’re going? I do! This is the second year that I’ve done a year in a review, and while they take hours to write, they’re worth it. I hope you agree. Speaking In 2019, I spoke at 53 events […]
Making Choice Menus Better
Choice menus (sometimes called Extension Menus or Choice Boards or fifty other titles) are a foundational technique for many teachers. Typically, they’re a grid somewhat like a tic-tac-toe board that has different options students can choose from to complete some task or project. Just do a quick search and you’ll see thousands of them. I’ve […]
Christmas Books for Kids with All the Feels
Every Christmas, I put away the children’s books that fill a basket in my family room and exchange them for beloved Christmas stories. In our home, it wouldn’t be Christmas without reading these favorites, both old and new. Most have tattered covers now, yet they are precious to me. I decided to share my favorites […]
10 Steps to a Better Parent-School Partnership: Pre-action, not Re-action
Would you like to build a stronger partnership with your child’s school? If you’re an educator, would you like to consider how to build a stronger partnership with families? When I keynoted the Colorado Association for the Gifted and Talented Conference in Loveland, I attended a session by Lisa Girard with this title. It was […]
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