Good Chicken Resources

I am a big believer that all notes should be posted to Google Classroom. I upload not only my Google Slide presentations but photos of anchor charts we make in class and keys to the graphic organizers we fill in while reading.  Providing digital copies of notes is a 21st-century teaching best practice.  However, I know that a lot of teachers do not necessarily agree with me. They believe note-taking is an important skill (I agree) and by providing students notes online they will never learn this skill (I disagree).  If you want to hold students accountable for note-taking there are other ways than simply not posting your notes.  Taking grades on notes or giving open note quizzes are ways to encourage note-taking and provide accountability. I think it is also important for us to teach students how to take notes.  I give my students (even high schoolers) visual and verbal cues of what they should and should not write in their notes.  So why I am so passionate...

Google Forms can be a powerful classroom tool! There are so many different things you can do with forms, and the functionality of it is almost limitless.  However, if you are newer to Google Forms it could be overwhelming. Here are five ways for newer users of Google Forms to start integrating it into your classroom.  Warm-Ups/Lesson Previews - One of the things I love about Google Forms is how easily you can embed YouTube videos in them.  This is a great way to introduce students to a concept as a warm-up activity or homework.  Have them watch the video and then answer a couple of questions about the topic.  Exit Tickets/Lesson Reflections -  Forms can also be used as a way to do exit tickets or allow students to reflect on what they learned. You can create specific exit tickets for each lesson, or create a generic template that you can reuse throughout the year.  Self-Grading Quizzes - A great time saver is creating self-grading quizzes. I like to...

Back to school is around the corner, and it is time to start thinking about ways to get to know your students. As a shy student myself, I have never been a huge fan of getting to know you activities that require me to talk to a lot of people or heaven forbid in front of the whole class.  Instead, I tend to do some sort of writing activity to get to know my students.  These are always fun and shorter writing activities.  I also get the added benefit, of being able to start to assess some of their writing skills.   Here are some different back to school ideas for English classrooms:  Six-Word Memoirs - For the last several years my students have done Six-Word Memoirs on the first day of school. (Not sure what a six-word memoir is? Watch this YouTube Video from SixWords.) I tell my students they can write their memoir about who they are or about how they currently feel about their lives.  We do them on index cards and they put their names on the back....

The new school year is just around the corner, and if you are like me life is about to get a little crazy.  Not only will I be pouring hours of time into getting my class and lesson plans ready for the new school year, but I have my own kids to get ready for school and two kids playing fall ball this year. I am always looking for ways to save an extra minute here or there because it adds up.  One strategy that I use and have found effective is batching.  Batching is when you group similar tasks all together in order to better focus on one thing at a time.  This is something I do anytime I have a lot of similar tasks to work on.  For example, when I am blogging I will sit down and write three or four blog posts at one time while I am in the writing zone.  Later, I will sit down and add pictures and revise all the blogs at one time, and then I do one last edit and schedule my blogs in a third sitting. I feel like I get more work done this way.  It Starts...