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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspire: A Sketch Art and Writing Journal was designed to facilitate students’ written, visual, and artistic expression of emotions and thoughts as well as provide for students an interesting review of the parts of speech. Included in this resource are 24 brainstorming exercises which precede each of the 24 writing prompts for journal writing. The activities in this journal provide inspirational topics for writing, review the parts of speech, promote creativity through written and artistic expr

This engaging resource was primarily designed not only to help students develop an attitude of gratitude but also to help students achieve better sentence variety through sentence combining. It is a good test prep resource in that sentence combining is found on many major, yearly tests. This resource includes CCSS aligned teaching pages on sentence combining that can be projected and which include various ways to improve sentence structure. The theme of the sentence combining activities is gr

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

The fun and engaging Naughty or Nice Game was designed to not only review punctuation rules but also reinforce positive behaviors or desired classroom behaviors and help students reflect on whether they have been naughty or nice this year. The Common Core State Standards aligned resource is 18 pages and includes instructions for Games 1-4, 24 punctuation review cards with rules and examples, and four pages of punctuation practice printables. The four punctuation review and practice printables