Poem in Your Pocket Day

How did you celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day? In class today, I gave my kids a handout explaining what Poem in Your Pocket Day is and how is is celebrated in places like New York City.  On the bottom of the page I included six pocket-sized poems.  They had the option of cutting out [...]

Dork Diaries by Rachel Renee Russell

Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life by Rachel Renee Russell is going to immediately draw comparisons to Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Both are in the illustrated novel category and both focus on characters in middle school struggling to be cool and part of the “in” crowd.  A universal theme, and one that my [...]

Current Events

I spend a little bit of time each day discussing current events with my students. If I don’t bring it up, they do. We try to clear up misinformation while staying informed about what’s going on in the world around us- plus connecting what’s going on in the world today to our curriculum. So I [...]

Making Text-to-Text Connections

Today my students impressed me so much!  We were reading Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and discussing the part of the story where Hannah/Chaya experiences the tattooing of Jews in the camps. One of my students raised his hand and said, “Ms. M., that reminds me a lot of Chains“. Intrigued, I encouraged him to [...]

If the Witness Lied by Caroline B. Cooney

I have been a Caroline B. Cooney fan since I read The Face on the Milk Carton back in elementary school. Cooney’s books are almost always edge-of-your-seat thrillers that are impossible to put down.  When I saw that she had a new novel coming out on May 12th, I immediately put it on my wishlist. [...]

Summer is Here!

It’s just a little early… I had an awesome day at Ag Field Day, a part of Rutgers Day here in NJ.  Spent the day with my fiance, my best friend, and her 3 month old daughter.  Other than the extreme heat (it hit 90 degrees!), it was a wonderful day! I didn’t get much [...]

Poem a Day Challenge #2

Be sure to check out all of the poems at Two Writing Teachers! Dune grass dancing in the summer breeze, Salt in the air, on your skin,  inhaled. exhaled. Sun beating down on smooth sand on smooth skin heat. light. Waves crashing on the shoreline Summer.

Poem a Day Challenge #1

Over at Two Writing Teachers, Ruth and Stacey are hosting a Poem a Day Challenge.  My students are writing poetry in writing workshop and I want to follow their awesome example.  That means being brave and sharing my own poems! While watching Oprah the other day, I was dumbfounded by her segment on the great [...]

Read-aloud Tips from President Obama

I was thrilled when I opened my email today and saw this: Reader-in-Chief: Read-aloud tips from President Obama.  Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that my passion is reading and sharing books with kids and teens.  Seeing the President of the United States reading, enthusiastically, to children is an amazing sight.  Hopefully, he will inspire [...]

Holocaust Remembrance Post

My classes are studying the Holocaust right now in Language Arts, via a read-aloud of The Devil’s Arithmetic and literature circles. My students chose to read a variety of books about WWII and the Holocaust-  T4 a novel, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, Boy Who Dared, Under the Blood-Red Sun, Weedflower, Behind the Bedroom [...]