Teaching Students with Learning Disabilities

4 Tips for Raising a Life Long Reader

1. Have lots of books around! Take your kids to the library or the bookstore (new or used), yard sales or to a local thrift-shop. Pick out books, magazines or comics that are of interest to your children. Joining reading incentive programs and educational activities at the local library is a great way to enrich your kids and promote social reading. Go to the library every week if you can.
2. Take books along with you. Make sure your kids see you reading, while you are waiting, at the beach and at home. Read to your child and have them read to you. Talk about books you like, talk about why you liked them!
3. Make reading enjoyable. Enjoying an old favorite is fine. Children learn more about the structure of literature and improve fluency with re-reads! Books that appear "too young" are fine, as long as reading is pleasurable. Make appropriate leveled books available too.
4. Make time! This is perhaps the hardest thing, as schedules fill up with sports, cookouts, trips, and movies. Make time for reading every day, perhaps part of an evening or bedtime routine. Swap out movies for books on a rainy day!

Fill your summer with reading and you will encourage kids to become life long readers!

Losing Math Skills Over the Summer? ...3rd Grade Common Core

100 Math Problems for Summer Review 3rd Grade Common Core

{Math Review Workbook by Classy Gal Designs and Publishing}

Contains:
100 Common Core 3rd grade level problems!

43 page PDF download (with answer key) 

Read 180 Workshop #7 "Taming Wild Beast" Opinion Writing

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FREE Workshop #7 "Taming Wild Beasts" Vocabulary Match -Up ...Just please share one of my links to support my work!

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7 Ways to Create a Balanced Literacy Program for Your Students

http://www.hallco.org/literacy/ 

I am always on the lookout for resources that will help me build a balanced literacy program. I work with students at a variety of levels, with a variety of deficits in a special education setting. 

This is what I found of interest:

In Balanced Literacy...
"...all aspects of reading, writing, speaking, and listening receive appropriate emphasis." (Routman, 2000)"

This is how this website describes balanced literacy: 

7 Ways to Create a Balanced Literacy Program for Your Students...

1. "provide students daily opportunities to engage in reading, writing, speaking, and listening 
2. include meaningful literacy activities
3. explicitly demonstrate reading, writing, and thinking processes
4. maintain safe, well-organized, collaborative classrooms
5.  differentiate
6. view teachers as informed decision-makers
7. guide and support students in becoming lifelong learners"
   

  In one of my previous posts I listed website I utilize. Reading Rockets is one of these it lays out strategies/interventions for each of the five BIG AREAS of reading... phonological  awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.  The strategies walk the teacher through strategies for each part of the reading process and HOW to use this strategy.

http://www.hallco.org/literacy/

www.readingrockets.org

How to Make "Pretty" Social Media Buttons

Summer vacation is the perfect time for a blogging teacher to freshen up a site. 

Do you want blog buttons that match the theme of your blog? 

Here are the directions:

1.) Designs your icons. I designed mine in Powerpoint. (That is my preferred program when I create products for my classroom, so I am familiar with it.)

2.) Upload them to the site where you store pictures. I use photobucket.  

 

3.) Open up your blog. If you’re a Blogger user, go to Layout, and add a gadget. The gadget you’ll need for this is called “HTML/Javascript”. For the title, write what you’d like to appear as the title – "Follow me".  

4.) In the Content section, paste the HTML you’ve amended for your own site.

For each icon that you want to add to your site, you’ll need the following HTML:

<a href="SOCIAL MEDIA LINK"><img alt="ALT TEXT HERE" src="RELEVANT IMAGE LINK" width="50px"></a>

5.) Replace the “Social Media Link” part with whichever profile you want to link and put the image URL to the icon that relates to that profile. Replace “Alt text here” with something like “Follow me on Twitter” (Though for mine, I chose not to have any text and deleted the text in between the quotation marks.) 

6.) Replace the text "Relative Image Link" with the  URL to the site where you stored your image (i.e.Photobucket). I love Photobucket because this step is easy. You just click on the image you want to use from your library. To the left you will see a list of addresses for your image. Click in the box "HTML"; it will automatically copy the link for you. 

 *Note* As you cut an paste, be sure to keep the quotation marks. Paste your links within the quotation marks. 

7.) Repeat as necessary until you have a block of HTML for each profile. Put it all together, and leave no spaces between it if you want the icons to appear in a row.

8.) At this point I saved it and viewed my side bar...oh no! The icons were too big! Not a problem... go back to the template and click on "edit" on the gadget you just added. Once there notice "Rich Text" mode? Click it. 
Now you are in IMAGES, so you will see all your buttons as images.
In this mode you can: drag and drop your buttons to new locations, resize buttons, and line up buttons next to each other. 

This is how I created the social media icons on my right side bar. 

For more tech help, be sure to check out my Pinterest board "Social Media & Technology". 

Mindset Bulletin Board

Growth Mindset Bulletin Board

 If you would like to recreate the bulletin board above, the printables are available in my Teachers pay Teachers store. To recreate the bulletin board above, print the graphics, cut them out and display them on your bulletin board. I added curled ribbons to make a festive balloons. If I may say so myself, this bulletin board really POPS!

Enjoy! 

Sincerely,

Shannon Henderson

Growth Mindset...Knowing You Can Grow!

Reading Lesson Comprehension Strategy: Making Predictions

I noticed as I graded Reading Response Journals Friday, some students were not clear about the reading strategy "making predictions". So, it is time to revisit the skill. Tomorrow in small group we are discussing the text, "Sophie's Squash Go To School."

 As I read, I will use the think aloud strategy to model how to make predictions. I will guide the students though a  discussion about predictions and they will use the graphic organizer to share their predictions. I made a slide show to walk them through the process. 

The video is designed to be PAUSED while you read the text, talk and students write on the T-Chart!

These T-chart graphic organizers will 

help students record their predictions.

 The T-chart graphic organizers are available from my Google Docs. 

From there you can also access a PDF version of the slide show! 

If you are interested in The Interactive Comprehension Reading Notebook featured in my lesson, ClICK HERE. It features:

50+ foldables and additional graphic organizers
Mini-anchor charts and foldable for each comprehension strategy:
Visualize, Question, Summarize, Prior Knowledge, Infer, Predict, Connecting and Text Evidence

Graphic organizers and foldables for other skills such as…
Retell, Important Parts of the Story, Main Idea & Details, Setting, Main Characters, Problem & Solution, Author’s Purpose Sort, Imagery, Point-of-View, & Text Features.

The Interactive Comprehension Reading Notebook also includes a comprehension reading log with think-marks. The reading log features double entry style page to promote use of text evidence. The reading log features a built in rubric, with a more detailed rubric to outline specific expectations for students.
Many foldables and graphic organizers also feature Handwriting without Tears style lines, sentence starters, and opportunities to provide text evidence.

If you would like to see all the pages included in the product, along with pictures of the product printed and set up, please visit this Youtube link: