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

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

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

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

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

Unique, engaging "Get to Know You" resource for the beginning of the school year, beginning of a semester or summer school. What type of bird are you? In this fun, 90-page resource, students connect their personalities to the attributes and traits of birds. The resource contains 27 differentiated informational texts about birds. Each informational text is written on three different levels. Each engaging text contains two paragraphs. The first paragraph includes interesting information about

Hi! It is important to make rules known to students and parents the first week of school. Why not make this experience ENGAGING! This entire back to school classroom rules resource, which outlines three different activity options, is editable. Insert your classroom rules into one of the blank puzzle design templates, or use one of the completed designs found in the resource. Furthermore, included is a puzzle activity which enlists students help in creating classroom rules. All activities a

Yes, rules and procedures must be established, but imagine what it would be like to sit through several classes, if not 5 or 6, where each teacher is talking nonstop about them. I propose a more engaging way to not only disseminate rules and procedures and but also reinforce them. This 17-page editable packet includes a Get to Know You HELLO Game and a game template to help disseminate, in an engaging format for students, what you would like for them to know right away to be successful in your

A FUN and engaging back to school resource for students and/or staff! Mingle with Metaphors is an editable file containing six engaging activities that can be used as follows: get to know you activities or icebreakers, student mingles on the first few days or weeks of school, back to school mingle nights, get to know each other functions for teachers and/or students, back to school faculty meetings with new teachers, professional development warm-up activity, and/or meet-n-greets. Specifically

This Christmas Tree Tangram Puzzles resource is a fun and engaging way to review and/or practice the following math skills: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, shapes, spatial sense, problem solving, and critical thinking. The activities, which are appropriate for Grades 3-7, can be used to differentiate instruction based on students’ readiness levels concerning the skills mentioned above. Each tangram puzzle requires students to arrange the seven given shapes in the s

The I Spy resource includes 8 I Spy games and 26 activities, which can be printed, displayed, or projected. There are 19 printable work pages. The 8 I Spy pages were designed to be used with the 19 work pages to help students practice letters, numbers, road signs, sight words, and addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts. This resource was created for preschool, elementary school, or homeschool use. It is a fun and engaging review of a number of skills. Students interact with t