Learn how executive function skills impact literacy learning and explore strategies to support students who struggle with them.
Evidence-based vocabulary instruction in practice. We unpack 3 key recommendations from Dr. Beck’s approach to teaching vocabulary in grades K–2 and draw connections from research to classroom practice.
Collaborative writing is a practice that supports both student engagement and growth in writing skills. In this post we will highlight how we built collaboration when teaching a specific writing strategy, sentence combining.
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For decades, teachers of writing have understood that intentionally building a classroom writing community is far more than just a way to help students work well with classmates and stay engaged, though these are worthwhile outcomes, too. In fact we know—both through our own action research and from empirical studies of numerous classrooms—that learning to write within a writing community is what ultimately leads to the success of individual writers.
To be a third grade student in Mr. Fells’ classroom at Manzanita Elementary School was to be one of the luckiest kids ever. He called our classroom the white whale because it was a blindingly white, single wide trailer.
Sometimes students struggle with examining their lives in the deep and powerful manner it takes to write effective personal narratives. One of my students, Laura, exclaimed in frustration one afternoon, “Mrs. D., you have 50+ years of memories. I only have 11. How can I reflect like you do?”
Hear from Allison Wist, Academic Coordinator for Resurrection-St. Paul School, Howard County, MD, about the school’s implementation of Being a Reader and the growth they are seeing in K–2 readers.
In Part One of this two-part blog series, I discussed the importance of teaching students the Opinion Writing genre and explored the goals of the Being a Writer Opinion…
Children love to voice their opinions, and when taught how, will often share them in writing. Some will even share their written viewpoints with very little instruction or…
Are you a LETRS-trained educator seeking tools to help you put your powerful learning into practice in your classroom? If so, this blog post by veteran literacy educator…
Before joining the Collaborative Classroom family, I spent over a decade in the “out of school” space, building one of the largest and most competitive high school debate…
In my blog “Literacy at Home: The Joyous Journey of Just One Book,” I share the story of how a particular copy of the book Love You Forever…
Linda Diamond has dedicated her career to teaching children to read, particularly those with word reading difficulties like dyslexia. A long-time partner of Collaborative Classroom, Linda co-founded the Consortium…
Educators! What is our desired goal? How do we achieve it? As I begin each school year teaching fifth graders, I ask myself how I can support my…
For me, becoming a virtual teacher has been filled with pitfalls, humor, hard work, and, finally, joy. This journey has not been an easy one. Like most of…
Tanny McGregor has a wealth of experience as educator, author, conference speaker and teacher on special assignment for West Clermont Schools in Cincinnati, Ohio. She brings a deep understanding…
The past three years, I have had the honor of sharing Collaborative Literacy with my hometown school in Del Norte, Colorado. One afternoon last winter, I ducked into…