Posts by sara23read
3 Years!
It has been three years since our skills-building book, Cuaderno de actividades Primaria Lectura, was released! To the teachers all over the country who have sought out our materials to support your Spanish-speaking emergent readers, thank you! We also appreciate the support of the independent teacher stores who have found our product to be of…
Read MoreEncounter by Jane Yolen
Encounter Author Jane Yolen, Illustrator David Shannon (No, David! books) Book Summary: When Christopher Columbus landed on the island of San Salvador in 1492, what he discovered were the Taino Indians. Told from a young Taino boy’s point of view, this is a story of how the boy tried to warn his people against welcoming…
Read MoreMaximizing academic language opportunities for our students
This post focuses on increasing the benefits of using Content and Language Objectives with your students. I have often stated that COLOs (Content and Language Objectives) should not only be used to set the scene for lessons but should also be revisited at the end of the lesson. This is a great teaching opportunity. Here…
Read MoreFree Features Charts for Day of the Dead and Halloween
Are you looking for activities to open a discussion on the similarities and differences of Day of the Dead and Halloween. I love using semantics feature charts to organize the similarities and differences between two ideas or concepts. Using the features charts allows me to easily scaffold for the language levels of students (work smarter,…
Read More#hatedTwitter
Twitter. I was never going to “do” Twitter. Twitter was for people who had way too much time on their hands and were only interested in pop culture. I had made derogatory comments towards hashtags by calling them “pound signs”—showing my age! In all honesty, the reason I caved was that I needed to expand…
Read MoreBeginning of the Year Book List
It’s the beginning of the school year when teachers, coaches and principals are looking for “new school year” read alouds, so I wanted to share the book I used to open my many years of teaching primary. At a great end of the year PD session my first-year teaching (1994), our school hosted W. Nikola-Lisa,…
Read MoreTeachers can prevent the summer slip too!
I wanted to provide you with some ideas for professional growth over the summer. It doesn’t matter if you only have five minutes or if you can dedicate a week, there is something for you to explore which will enhance your instruction for the upcoming school year. Take a look at this quick (4 slide) presentation for…
Read MoreRead Aloud Planning Template
FIND FINAL VERSIONS BELOW Co-teaching is on the rise when it comes to providing service to ELs. As Andrea Honigsfeld mentions in her latest book, the number one complaint of co-teaching remains: TIME. How can the monolingual teacher and the ESL teacher get together when planning time is so scarce? The Read Aloud Planning Template, in…
Read MoreActivity with High Student Engagement—Vocabulary Circuit
“Vocabulary Circuit” Activity (this link allows you to make a copy of this activity for you to edit) “Vocabulary” because teacher chooses 10 vocabulary words or concepts he/she wants to students to review. “Circuit” because all the students follow a type of circle (circuit) as they find correct answers and are then led to the…
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