Curriculum & Lesson Design

Nearing the end of the school year? Keep students engaged. Try these end of the year activities for secondary ELA. Sometimes teachers feel guilty about incorporating fun lessons at the…

Whether you’re helping students prepare for a unit assessment, mid-terms, final exams, or standardized tests, effective exam review strategies are important. I’ve written about maximizing review time previously. In this…

Figurative language is easy to make one of the most engaging aspects of an ELA class. By nature, it is playful. Because it can be paired with pretty much any…

Wondering how to teach sentence structure? We’ve all seen plenty of student writing where sentence fluency issues abound. Teaching students to be aware of various sentence types as well as…

You’re on a mission to add creativity to your lesson plans in order to engage students in meaningful learning. Excellent! Your students will thank you. When we think about making…

Teaching writing is hard. It just is. For a handful of students, writing is second nature; still, most need support and guidance. Once students get passed the introduction paragraph, they…

Looking for ways to teach note taking strategies, but not sure where to begin? Keep reading. Okay class, today we are going to be taking notes during our mini-lesson on…

A short story unit is the perfect way to begin a school year. Short stories are quick and applicable to so many learning standards. Yet, they are versatile, so you…

Looking to create a new language arts curriculum, add to an existing one, or give it a complete overhaul? In this post, you’ll find first quarter ELA curriculum ideas that…

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of running a passion project in my classroom for several years, but I wasn’t ready to give it a try until recently. After completing…