resources

Our Content Specialists have created blog posts. Below is a short “tasting” of each blog article and you can click to read more! Enjoy the tasting. Elementary K-6 Closing the Gap: Reading Strategies for ALL Students | Anita Pratt The Science of Reading is gaining recognition and support from more and more educators across the country. Research is suggesting that our brains are not wired to learn to read the same way we learn to talk. We learn to talk by listening to others and following their lead, but reading has to be explicitly taught. Phonics has to be systematically...

Are you looking for new ways to reach students, especially those fast finishers / high-performers? Do you need ways to differentiate tasks without requiring a ton of extra time? Maybe you need something for your students to work on that is meaningful and not just a time-filler? Why not use a choice board!   Choice boards allow students to make choices in their learning, which amps up motivation and engagement.  When students are given a menu of options, they feel more in charge of their learning and often put forth more effort. As a teacher, I also like how I can...

The language domains, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, are the 4 ways that people can interact with language. Two of these skills, speaking and writing, are described as productive skills as we create language with each of these. The other two skills, listening and reading, are receptive skills because we use these skills to receive information from an outside source. In this post, we will focus on ways that you can practice the language domain of reading by using Seesaw.

Did you know that February is Digital Learning Month? We have some fun choice boards with helpful links and resources for you to use to help you become a Digital Learning Superstar! ⭐️✨ 🍎 Elkhart Teachers: Choose 5 of the options and send us your pictures to be entered into our giveaway! Just click on the image and it will open in a new tab so you can use the links. 👇🔗 Elementary Teachers Secondary Teachers Elementary Administrators Secondary Administrators

At Elkhart Community Schools, we have a surprisingly large population of English Language Learners for a small midwest town. Because of this, we have to be very intentional about planning for and utilizing the four language domains to help boost understanding of the English language when providing content to students. In this post, we will focus on practicing the language domain of listening and how we can use Seesaw to help support this domain.

I have curated some fun and engaging activities that you can do with your students in this cold and dreary month. Also If you haven’t heard we have started a podcast!

Graphic organizers are an amazing way to adapt content to meet the needs of all of your learners. In this blog post, we will highlight using graphic organizers to help support the lesson preparation feature of adapting content to all levels of student proficiency.  Graphic organizers are a great tool that provides students with visual clues to help support text and language that is challenging to understand. They can be used before, during, or after reading.  Graphic organizers can also be used specifically for specific subjects and content areas.  Seesaw UsersIf you are looking for activities that have graphic organizers,...

Do you remember hearing “Do The Blue” but don’t remember what it refers to? Quick Practices (K-6th), Daily Routines (K-2nd), and Anytime Problems (3rd-6th) are all parts of the  “Doing the Blue” section of lessons in Math Expressions. “Doing the Blue” are the main components of the lesson that should be taught. Quick Practices, Daily Routines, and Anytime Problems are an important part of the process and student learning in math.  These practices and routines focus on concepts and skills throughout the year that are needed for student mastery.  They build classroom belonging and develop student leaders, as well as...

Finding new and creative ways to engage students can be challenging. We know that it is best practice to use multimedia content in the classroom, which helps the teacher engage the students and in turn helps the student to be more involved and retain more information from the lesson. Sometimes finding those resources and strategies, however, can be difficult.   Subscribers to Discovery Education have access to an extensive collection of multimedia resources, as well as a collection of creative, research-based instructional strategies, known as Spotlight on Strategies (SOS).  These strategies are presented by teachers for teachers to support implementing multimedia...

My husband is a reader, but not the kind of reader that reads novels. He’s the type that you can’t bring to a museum because he will read every word on every sign. If my honeymoon to Hawaii taught me anything it’s how little I know about Pacific Islander heritage and history, because everything I know is what he shared with me that week after he read every sign, everywhere we went. Nowhere in my formal education did I learn about Pacific Islander history, or Asian American history for that matter. May is the month that we celebrate Asian American...

I was able to work with some awesome 7th and 8th graders from North Side to build this Jammin’ SEL resource that is easy to edit and simple to use. This isn’t limited to just middle schoolers though! Anyone can use Jamboards to connect to SEL! Why SEL We are learning the importance of social and emotional learning and the impact it has on students’ learning. Creating opportunities where students can thoughtfully reflect on their own emotions can help them process through some of the more difficult ones. A student was helping me build this jamboard and she said, “doing...

October 16 Update: Canvas has now made immersive reader available in more areas, not just pages. Read more below. Our students enter our classrooms with different life experiences. This is especially true with our English Language learners. Students come from different experiences and the strategy of Building Background that we all learned or are learning from SIOP helps students connect with the material in more meaningful ways. 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...

Each month, the Technology Ambassadors work hard to create resources, materials, and other tools to help you with planning, brainstorming, or getting quick tips. To make them easy to find, we’ll publish the collection here on the blog as well as send an email digest. Don’t forget to check the PD signup page for upcoming workshops. There are new topics added regularly and we’ll continue to send weekly updates about what’s available to participate in. We archive nearly all PD on the Professional Development page. If you can’t make a Meet, head over there to see what’s available for on-demand PD. To get...