Math Notebooking

I let the students make a cover page to personalize their notebook.They then use the next four pages for the table of contents where they write the date, topic and what page that topic can be found on.  After those four pages, the students start numbering their pages.In the past, I used the notebook purely as a place to do classwork and homework problems and to take a few notes. This year I've tried to make it a little more interactive. The...

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Interactive Bulletin/White Boards

Every student teacher's dream is to have his/her own classroom and spend hours...days...weeks during the summer setting it up.  Desk arrangements, putting names on almost EVERYTHING, and making those cutesy bulletin boards sound like a blast!  The day before the students enter, the room is perfect, spotless, silent.  Then......they come.This was me right out of student teaching 5 years ago.  I thought everything in my room needed...

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Morning Meeting Shares Sign Up Board

With progress reports done and less than a month until February vacation, I was feeling creative this week.  So when a need arose during Morning Meeting, and some unuseable items needed discarding, inspiration struck!The Need:I used to think "Show and Tell" was too babyish for fourth grade.  But my class LOVES share time during Morning Meeting.  It's funny how the group dynamic changes from one year to the next.  Last year's group...

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Short Stories in the Classroom

I feel very fortunate to have many students who love to read. On a team of over 100 sixth grade students, I would guess that about 80% of them would read all day if they could. I've worked hard as the reading teacher on the team to inspire "reading magic" in my room, create a fun and interesting classroom library, and build time for pleasure reading into each and every school day (and now my team teachers do the same). Our students always have SSR...

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Groundhogs, Graphs and a Freebie.. OH MY!

It's already Sunday? Where has the weekend gone? Guess it's time to get down to business and get prepared for a new school week.First, did you enjoy the Free for All Linky Party yesterday? If you haven't checked it out yet, what are you waiting for. At the time of writing this post there are already over 50 items linked up and it will continue to grow through tomorrow so keep checking back!Well, onto today's topic of Groundhogs, Graphs and a Freebie!...

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First Free For All Linky Party!

Are you ready for our first "Free 4 All" Linky Party here on All Things Upper Elementary? So what's it all about you may be asking. Well, do you have an awesome FREEBIE to share with other 3rd though 6th grade teachers? Well then, feel free to link up below so we can all share in the goodness!Now, what else can you do? Promote the Linky Party on your blog, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter!Don't forget to leave comments and feedback for participants...

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Student Created Learning Goals

Yeah! It's Friday! We made it through another busy week! How many more until spring break?????We are so excited to be writing this post to share with all of you! Today we wanted to share something we have our students do: create learning goals. As teachers we have our teaching goals and objectives which are critical because these give us the direction we need to go. Without them we would not be very effective teachers. But what about our students?...

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Interactive Read-Alouds in Intermediate Grades

Hello Friends! I am super excited to be sharing my thinking in my first blog post here on All Things Upper Elementary!  I have enjoyed reading my friends’ posts this past week.  I just love having this blog as a resource…it’s like the professional development we all wish we had more of at our schools!So, today I am going to share some of my thinking around interactive read-alouds (IRA).  Interactive read-alouds are when teachers read...

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