Simply For Teachers

  They may be part of your classroom furniture now,  dividers and plexiglass shields.  We can either complain or make the best of it and I for one am in the ladder camp.   Tip: Look at that divider as another teaching surface!  Here are some ways that I have incorporated those intrusive pieces of furniture into my instruction.   1. Use post-it notes! Is there a limit to what we can do with post-its? I think not!  There are many ways to use post-its on the dividers.  One way is writing on the opposite side so the sticky part is facing the students and putting up words, letters, sounds, facts, etc.  What is a better place to put something you want the students to reference, than right in front of them?   One way I've used this strategy is by writing the high frequency words we will practice in text on post-its and place them on the glass.  We talk about the words and practice reading them in isolation first....

  Your students have the skills, but it's not coming together into correct sentences....you have some options! Correct sentence level writing is imperative for successful paragraphs and essays.   When a student struggles in writing, many times we find that they are struggling at the sentence level.  By drilling down to the basics, we can give students the confidence to compose complete and meaningful sentences. Some of these strategies can be used in our whole group instruction, a Tier One intervention.  By establishing routines that support sentence level writing, we are giving our students expectations & shared language that you can take to a tier two in small groups. Approaches like Modeling & Shared Writing are easy ways to infuse sentence level instruction into your daily routines for the entire class. CUPS is a simple & meaningful self-monitoring tool that can be taught and used with the entire class.  The approach teaches studen...