Holly Mecher

Tip #1: Be mindful of your own window of tolerance.  When you are within your window of tolerance, you feel like you are able to deal with whatever is coming your way. We have the ability to show up for ourselves during difficult moments, and show up for our students when they are struggling. However, when you experience stress, your window of tolerance shrinks and it is easier for you to become dysregulated.  When we are outside our window of tolerance, our reactions to student behavior can negatively impact our students. If you feel like you have moments like this,...

Dear struggling teacher, below you will find our 4 big suggestions when approaching this issue with best technology and SIOP practices, Smekens strategies, and utilizing our ELA curriculum resources.  Tip #1: Use accessibility features on the iPad, including those within Seesaw and Canvas. First and foremost, ensure your content is accessible to your students. Have you taught your students the basic accessibility features within the iPad? Be sure to take time to teach these features and then remind students to use them! This will allow your students to be more independent while working through work that the rest of the class has...

Dear frustrated teacher, below you will find our 3 big suggestions when approaching this issue with de-escalation, Trauma-Informed Care, and SIOP in mind.  Tip #1: Don’t take student behavior personally.  Before you can help students control their outbursts and time on task, you need to ensure your own emotions are regulated. This starts with rational detachment. In a nutshell, rational detachment is the ability to control our own behavior/emotions and not take student hostility personally. Sounding easier than it is, you may need to practice regulating your own emotions and reactions to student behavior.  Take a step back and take...

If you have yet to open flipgrid, here is your friendly reminder and gentle nudge to give it a try this school year. While there is no substitute for students speaking directly to a teacher or peer, flipgrid can be an amazing way to encourage students’ communication and dialogue. This is especially true for our English Language Learners who may benefit from extra time and practice before speaking.   Wait, what is Flipgrid? Flipgrid is a video discussion platform that allows all student voices to be heard. Students respond to prompts posted by their teacher by recording a video response....

The majority of my students in my 4th grade classroom are able to use writing to explain their thinking and answer any given problem. They may need sentence starters or a bit of extra support, but they will be able to find success and mastery just by writing. However, there is always a student or two that need a little more than extra support, and would benefit from being able to respond to problems in different ways. Explaining answers aloud is a common IEP accommodation and strategy for our EL students, but can often be mentally draining to put into...

Classroom Screen has been around for a long time, and I thought it could be helpful in the classroom, but I never realized what a game changer it truly was.  I’ve now been using Classroom Screen for a week – that’s right, only a week – and I can already tell you that it makes a difference for my students.  I am a type B teacher.  Organization is not my strong suit and consistency doesn’t come naturally. Despite this, I know that is what students need in the classroom, so I try my hardest to find ways to be organized and...

Before we begin, it is important that we all have a shared understanding of the purpose of grades.  For standard based grading, we need to agree that the purpose of grades is to represent what students know and are able to do. If this is something you can agree with, you are ready to get started with standard based grading.  So what do we need to do to get started? We’ve been working on essential standards in PLCs for almost two years. It’s time to put those essential standards to work by linking them directly to what students are doing...

In my classroom, I want all students to learn. Don’t we all? But I also want my nights and weekends to myself and not to be spent lesson planning. So how does one find the time to plan for all SIOP components within every lesson you teach and still work within contract hours? Well, the truth is… you don’t. At least not yet.  If you are just getting started on the journey to ensuring your lessons are accessible to all, let me be the first to welcome you to our quest. Below I broke down the SIOP components into two...

Students love an opportunity to celebrate a holiday. Unfortunately, I often forget to plan for holidays until the day before and I find myself in a last-minute pickle searching for engaging activities for my students. If you are anything like me and have yet to make plans to celebrate Veterans Day, check out some of the resources below.  Our Youngest Learners Letter Writing Veterans Day is a great day to have our students practice their letter writing skills Use. Consider using this free, printable thank you template if you’re looking for a simple paper-pencil activity. Here you can find it...

Looking for ways to change up how you use content and language objectives in your classroom? Below find 5 ideas on how to up your game with content and language objectives. Up Your Game Idea #1: Make it Routine Include a consistent presentation of your content and language objectives at the beginning of your class period. Consider including it with your bell work, including vocabulary that students will need to understand to be successful for the class period, or even reminding students of what they learned in the previous lesson. Want to use these templates as-is? Find them here on...

Practice and Application The 6th component of SIOP is Practice and Application. Practice and Application focuses on how will students will practice both the content and language objectives. It is the what and the how of the lesson. When we are thinking about Practice and Application, it’s important to keep three considerations in mind. Provide hands-on materials and/or manipulatives for students to practice using new content knowledge. Provide hands-on activities for students to apply content and language knowledge in the classroom. Use activities that integrate all language skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) In this blog post, we will be focusing...

No two students enter our classroom with the same life experiences. This is especially true when you have English language learners as members of your classroom community. To help counter the differences in our students’ diverse backgrounds, we work on the SIOP strategy of Building Background. Building background simply means we prepare our students for what they are about to learn. There are three main considerations for when you are actively working on building background with students:  A student’s own background is important. As teachers, it is important that we recognize that students from culturally diverse backgrounds may struggle with...

When looking for a new program to use with students, my first question is always “Can they log in with google?” instantly followed by “Can I just give kids a class code?”. The last thing I want to worry about is creating a class, inputting student information, creating usernames and passwords, managing those usernames, and the list goes on. Well, Clever is the solution to that problem. It not only gives students ONE website to log into, instead of needing to log into different websites all day, but will also automatically create classes, enroll students into those classes, and give...