If you also have a lot of books for your room, make sure that you haven’t just shoved your books into a corner and forgotten about them or have them set up in such disarry that nobody is interested in looking.  This can easily happen when you’re teaching the older grades and don’t have as much time for independent reading time.  A few space saving ideas for organizing books that you may not have thought of before are to use shoe boxes, a shoe organizer, or milk crates.

To use shoe boxes, you can place books, spine up in a shoe box and pile the boxes on top of each other.  Let the students decorate the boxes to give them more incentive to take a book.  Organize them by theme, author, reading level, or however you want.  This also gives you the option of putting the lid on the box and putting it away when you don’t want those books circulating any longer.  This might hold true if you have a box of books on a particular theme or are tired of the students only going for certain popular or trendy books.

Hang a clear plastic shoe organizer over a door and put a book inside each pocket.  Turn a milk crate sideways and get an instant shelf.

There are many ways to organize and store your selection of books.  Check out section one (chapter 6) for other great ideas to organize a classroom libraryhttp://www.tipsforteachers.net/store/youve-got-the-job-now-keep-it/.

Leave us a comment and let us know some of your favorite organizational ideas!

Here are just a few ways to make quick and fun bulletin boards for your room:

• Use cloth instead of paper.  Works the same way but give a totally different feel to the room.  I did a unit on the rain forest once and found some inexpensive jungle cloth for our rain forest bulletin boards.

• Make your bulletin boards stand out, literally.  Go 3D. Use crumpled tissue paper, boxes, or anything you can staple or tack to a board.

• Paint on paper.  Save yourself the time of cutting out letters and use paint!

• One of my favorites is to use the newspaper.  This bulletin board needs to be changed throughout the year but it’s a supplemental learning tool.  Stay tuned for a bunch of ideas on how to use this bulletin board as a classroom activity.

*Find more ideas in Section One of You’ve Got The Job–Now Keep It!

• Add comfy places to sit such as bean bag chairs and pillows.

• Create curtains by placing fabric along the tops or sides of the windows in your classroom.

• Add a table floor or lamp.

• Bring in some real plants to liven up the classroom, especially during those long winter months where we crave anything green or flowery.

• Search out garage sales to find inexpensive items for your classroom.

For more teacher ideas on setting up your classroom and organizing yourself, check out sections one and two in You’ve Got The Job—Now Keep It! (Shameless plug, sorry)  http://tinyurl.com/3kv3j6j

Right up there with the debate over standardized testing is the debate over homework.

Every year children and parents dread it and, if they are truthful, most teachers don’t have a particular love affair with homework either.  After all, it’s just one more thing they need to keep track of, grade, and create consequences for if it’s not completed.  So why do teachers give homework?  Some answers are: to practice or extend skills taught in school, to see what students can complete independently (which is never done independently at home), or to reinforce good study habits.

There are arguments that more homework will increase standardized test scores, yet there are studies that show the opposite.  There are arguments that homework prepares high school students for college.  But compare the amount of time high school students spend actually sitting in a school each week (average 35 hours) to the amount of time college students spend sitting in class (average 12 hours).  If a college student only spends 12 – 15 hours actually sitting in a classroom what are they doing with all their extra time?  We should assume they have all that extra time to complete their college assignments.  Whereas high school students spend an average of 35 hours sitting in school but are still expected to complete an additional 5 – 15 hours of homework a week, depending on the classes they take.   That argument alone is worth another blog, but back on point, is the homework really worth it?

On the other side of the debate are those who think homework is nothing more than a time waster for kids, parents and teachers.   Homework lacks creativity, takes time away from kids being able to come home after school and be kids, and in those cases where children really struggle on a nightly basis, it can create a hate of learning and school.

Is there a middle road, a balance, some moderation?  I’m wondering how I was able to go to school and hold down a job after school and still be on a high school team.  I know the answer is that I didn’t have 2 or 3 hours of homework a night. Now my age is showing.

In a recent Time Magazine article, The Myth of Homework, Claudia Wallis discusses this debate in a very clear concise manner.  http://tinyurl.com/lkhsl Check it out and post a comment here to let us know what you think!

There is now year round schooling in many parts of our country and many parts of the world.  I’ve spoken to teachers and students who attend year round schooling and none seem to mind.  They get several three week breaks during the year so instead of one long vacation, they get many mini breaks.  The idea of summer vacation began when children needed to leave school to help out on the farm when the crops needed picking.    Since that’s no longer the case, at least in most parts of the country, the question needs to be asked:  Is summer vacation still necessary?  Gone seem to be the days when children ran out the door in the morning to play and came home at dinner time.  With so many families where both parents are working outside the home, children are being shuffled to summer camps and day programs anyway.  So has the idea of summer vacation met its end?

In my ideal world a “school summer” wouldn’t be traditional but would instead be about discovery and learning:  math games, science experiments, larger than life social studies projects, literacy circles, drama, art, music, and fun.  There would be no grades, no tests, no homework, and no worries.   Students would enjoy learning and teachers would enjoy teaching without all the constraints.  That’s my ideal world.  In reality I can’t even imagine how that would happen.  But one can always dream.

Enjoy your summer!

For further reading on the subject, NPR has a great interview on their site http://tinyurl.com/3jq5auk

Please post a comment and let us know what you think!

Pam Allyn’s article, Best Books for Boys, doesn’t just cover boys, it gives straight forward practical advice on getting children interested in reading whether it be in the classroom or at home.   Following the acronym READ she lays out the steps for instilling a lifelong love of reading in children:

R – Ritual

E – Environment

A – Access

D – Dialogue

Sound interesting?  Check out the link above and read her article in its entirety.

Poetry – If you didn’t get a chance to incorporated poetry into your writing curriculum (or even if you did) this is a great time to have some fun and experiment with poetry.  Go to the school library and grab some great poetry books and look online for writing ideas.  Head to our store and download our easy–to-make poetry books that allow your students to quickly and easily learn about four different types of poetry.  http://www.tipsforteachers.net/store/student-poetry-books/

Read, read, read – Take this opportunity to read wonderful picture books or your favorite chapter book to the class.  When teaching higher grades you’ll have less and less of an opportunity to read books aloud to your class, so don’t miss this chance.

Internet projects – If you have Internet access in your classroom, computer lab, or at the school library, create an Internet search on a topic you have studied in class or give the students several websites and have them do a scavenger hunt finding bits of fun information.  Let the students work in pairs and give out prizes to the first students to complete the hunt.

Class game projects – If you’re really on the ball, plan an in-class book report but make it fun.  Give students a choice of three or four books, and finalize selections a month in advance to allow for reading time.  Limiting book selection allows students to work on final projects together.  During those days before the end of the year, have the students do the book reports in class.  Some fun book report ideas are creating puppet shows or plays that re-enact favorite scenes (both puppet shows and plays can be performed for other classes or grades),  making dioramas, drawing comic strips, or devising board games that everyone can play.

One-on-one work – While the class is spending time writing poetry, finishing, actives, doing book reports or working on Internet searches, take the time to work one-on-one with students who need some extra help.  It always seems hard to find the time to work with students independently during the year, so take advantage of the slightly slower pace just before vacation.

Do you have any other ideas?  We’d love to hear from you.  Post a comment below.

Recently a friend posted a link on Facebook regarding a Kumon Program.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/fashion/with-kumon-fast-tracking-to-kindergarten.html?_r=2&ref=education I don’t know a lot about the program itself and so I am not commenting on that particular program.  What I am commenting on is the fundamentals of what the article was discussing, which is the concept of having young children tutored (pre pre k) to get a head start for kindergarten and the methods that are employed.  This article reminds me of those early reading programs that are advertised on TV telling parents they can get their young children (as young as 6 months old) reading.

Any educator knows that there are developmentally appropriate stages for teaching children to read.  Yes, there are those children who can read when they are 3, and their parents have the bumper stickers to prove it, but most children will start reading either shortly before kindergarten or in kindergarten.  And by beginning reading I mean learning sight words and learning how to decode, which are two early reading strategies for children.   They will also begin to understand reading for meaning, and how to use context clues and pictures clues to help them read.  Someone asked me, well isn’t reading sight words just memorizing, and isn’t that what those programs are teaching?  Yes, and no.  If you give sight words to a four or five year old they have an understanding of what the word means.  In addition, they can use them in a sentence, apply them in writing activities and build on them to learn new words (ex: at – cat – that).  They also have the ability to learn new words by using context clues when reading and they can understand when something doesn’t make sense and make adjustments.  Early readers can make logical predictions, make text to text and text to self correlations, and start to make inferences.  To me, and I believe to most educators, that is reading.

Now onto math, another entire blog unto itself, but I feel the need to address it based on the article being discussed.  Sure you can have young children memorize math facts, that’s easy.  But do they understand the meaning behind the math facts?  Can they apply those math facts to a math problem or authentic situation?  Case in point: drill into a child that the area of a rectangle = length x width and the perimeter of a rectangle = adding the length of all the sides.  Now tell the child the area of a rectangle is 24 and ask them for the possible combinations for the length of the sides.  Throw in that the perimeter is 22, and see what happens.  For students who have just memorized the facts or the formulas it’s hard for them to analyze this problem, but for the students who have learned to look at math formulas and take them apart to understand why and how it works, those are the students who have truly learned math.

So yes, we need to learn sight words and memorize math facts and formulas, but that’s just part of the entire equation. If you are going to teach your teenager to drive and you simply have them sit in a driver’s Ed class to learn the fundamentals of driving a car, how confident are you that they are ready to drive by themselves?

So, the types of programs that are dubbed skill and drill (or drill and kill)  might work on the surface, but is that what we want for our 3 year olds?

Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think.