Reflective Thinker

An engaging grammar / writing resource for the beginning of the school year! Fun and engaging bellringers or daily oral language practice! Help students grasp the importance of proofreading their work. Set high expectations concerning correct spelling, punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure, for effective communication and writing skills are targeted 21st century skills. Use this resource, which is filled with humorous, authentic examples of poor grammar, to help students embrace the value

A challenging, fun ELA review! Sure to keep students' minds engaged! Great classroom management extension activities for those who finish work early. This brain games and puzzles resource for Grades 4-8 includes 10 challenging brain games or puzzles to review English/language arts content. The games or puzzles facilitate critical thinking skills as well as reinforce all of the following skills: spelling, simile, metaphor, personification, theme, idioms, irony, mood, tone, novel, symbolism, v

This Socratic seminar contains a great message for the beginning of the school year! Socratic seminar is an excellent and engaging way for students to practice higher order thinking skills. Introduce your students to Socratic seminar with this easy-to-implement, step-by-step resource. This 32-slide PowerPoint resource with printables is a Socratic seminar to include pre and post activities featuring the poem “A Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. This resource includes a well-organized protocol fo

Use the 32 slides with engaging activities, appropriate primarily for Grades 4-8, to convince students to use transition words to spice up their writing. High school students, who need differentiated instruction concerning the use of transitional words, can benefit from this resource, as well. Research shows explicitly teaching writing strategies such as the use of transitional words has a strong impact on the quality of all students’ writing, and it has been found especially effective for stud

Perfect for establishing norms before students engage in collaborative work! A great resource for beginning of the school year. Students must learn how to effectively work together and be taught how to build positive and supportive relationships with diverse members of a group, which is a critical 21st century skill. Effective collaboration must be developed; it doesn’t happen without work and effort. Showing students how to develop and use group norms is one researched-based strategy that help

This well-organized “I Dream” poetry and speech analysis resource consists of teaching slides as well as 20 analysis tasks. Students identify, explain, and citing text evidence concerning theme, mood, tone, main idea, point of view, personification, simile, metaphor, symbolism, imagery, key vocabulary, and rhyme scheme. In addition, students draw conclusions, make inferences, and use context clues. The analysis tasks are centered around four literary texts to include three dream related poems

High interest! Engaging! Fun! Sure to bring lighthearted laughter in your classroom! Spice up language lessons with "Falling into Fall," a resource filled with high-interest passages and pictures created to add pizzazz and humor to Daily Oral Language (DOL) and/or everyday edits (91 Pages). This engaging, fun resource contains 91 slides that are divided into three sections. Section 1 contains 11 grammar, conventions, and spelling teaching slides with interesting, funny examples, which can be us

Fun and engaging! This easy to implement resource is much more than a Socratic seminar. It includes high interest activities and a differentiated quiz. Socratic seminar is an excellent and engaging way for students to practice higher order thinking skills. This 73-slide PowerPoint resource with printables is a Socratic seminar featuring the poem “The Spider and the Fly” by Mary Howitt. The resource includes a well-organized protocol for conducting a formal discussion or Socratic seminar based o

Fun and engaging! Add fun and humor to your comparative and superlative adjective lessons with this supplemental, no prep resource. The humorous, comparative and superlative adjective review game was designed to be an engaging and amusing practice to spice up your current comparative and superlative adjective lessons. This resource, which was designed to appeal to varied learning styles, contains a brief review which might be all that a middle school student needs. If you teach upper element

Use the 230 ENTRY and EXIT ticket choices across the curriculum and throughout the school year with any content topic to promote critical thinking, review content material, differentiate instruction, and collect data as a formative assessment for instructional decision making. Because the entry and exit ticket questions span a wide range of readiness and difficulty levels, this resource can be used to differentiate instruction in Grades 4-12. Project the 82 slides or print them and use them in

SENSORY DETAILS improve writing! This resource encourages students to use sensory details in their writing. These engaging, descriptive writing lesson activities are aligned to writing standards and are appropriate for Grades 4-8. In Activity 1, students categorize sensory details into categories that appeal to the various senses. This is a good test prep activity as sensory details are often covered on standardized tests. Activity 2 is a descriptive writing puzzle /game activity involving favo

Do you teach collaboration skills? This is a great resource to use before students engage in a collaborative project or activity! The activities in this resource can be used in any content area across the curriculum to teach collaboration skills. During the first month of back to school or before students engage in collaborative learning, use the activities in this resource as a springboard to help students understand your expectations during cooperative learning assignments. The activities can

Great back to school resource and bulletin board idea! One of the best ways to find out how students learn best is to have them complete a learning styles inventory or learning styles survey such as the one found in this resource. This highly engaging, fun learning styles resource was designed to be used in Grades 3-9 across the curriculum to help teachers better understand the learning styles of their students and to help students understand how they learn best and grasp that their peers not

With the HUMOR and knowledge of five expert pigs your lessons on paragraph writing will not be a BOAR! This standards aligned resource helps students not only write better paragraphs through scaffolded, high interest teaching materials but also provides test prep practice and review concerning the following skills: main idea, topic sentence, unrelated details, supporting details, text evidence, transitional words, concluding sentence, narrow and broad topics, and paragraph writing. The mini u

Socratic seminar is an excellent and engaging way for students to practice higher order thinking skills and speaking and listening skills. This 62-slide PowerPoint resource with printables is a Socratic seminar featuring the poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. The resource includes a well-organized protocol for conducting a formal discussion or Socratic seminar based on Poe’s poem. On Days 1-3 students complete several analysis, critical thinking, and writing activities as well as vocabulary

For more effective classroom management and organization, use editable movie tickets to assign seats, group students, dole out group roles, conduct drawings, and organize lines to lunch and assemblies. To help students warm up to the idea of assigned seats, use movie tickets as a fun way to assign seats and make seat numbers and other information such as room number, teacher's name, and locker numbers known to students. Students keep their movie tickets to help them remember the room number and

Keep students engaged and enhance their vocabulary at the end of the school year or summer school. Students use critical thinking to solve the 12 brain games / word puzzles in this resource. Each brain game or puzzle is designed to engage and challenge students as they expand their knowledge and vocabulary concerning prefixes. This resource is best for students in Grades 5-12. It is also appropriate for adults and staff, who enjoy brain games and word puzzles.The 39 prefixes included in this sta

This is a fun and engaging, movie-themed resource, which can be used across the curriculum in Grades 5-12! There are seven get to know you activities in this back to school resource. This standards aligned resource includes 20 "Get to Know You" editable movie tickets, 60 editable movie titles, 23 slides or pages, 7 "Get to Know You" editable movie activities with instructions, 5 editable printables, 2 verbal activity options, 1 kinesthetic activity option, 3 writing assignments, a variety of "G

The five pumpkin critical thinking and logic activities included in this 17-page packet can be used across the curriculum in Grades 4-8. The five printable activities are perfect for a math, science, or literacy center. The engaging logic activities in this packet can be assigned as an independent work packet or used as collaborative work in a small group or large group setting. They could also be used as bellringers or assigned to early finishers. The packet includes critical thinking and logic

Use this resource to promote an interesting, unique review of the parts of speech for test prep or at the end of the year.This resource is an engaging supplement to any parts of speech unit plan or textbook that you are currently using in your classroom. Humor is infused throughout the five engaging activities found in this 56-slide PowerPoint resource designed to further students’ knowledge of the parts of speech as well as provide opportunities for students to practice higher level thinking s