This new one-week unit is designed to help support your teaching and to develop students' social-emotional skills in order to engage in an open and supportive classroom community. These first class periods are important to establish classroom norms and an inclusive environment where students honor and value differing perspectives, question assumptions, and actively listen to others.
This is the link to the resource:
​​www.facinghistory.org/back-to-school/teaching-toolkit/

Research-based instruction strategies can help educators reach all of their students regardless of the differences among them. Not only do these strategies offer proven evidence for what does and doesn’t work, but they also propose ideas and tactics that educators may have never even thought of implementing in their classroom.  
We’ve compiled a list of research-based methods for maximizing literacy instruction. Check out the links below for ways to improve the reading experience of our students:

• “Should We Teach Reading Comprehension Strategies?” settles a classic debate in reading instruction through literacy research.
• If you’re concerned about how to motivate or improve the progress of low performers in the classroom, “Bringing Low Reading Achievement Into Focus” provides a comprehensive guideline.
• “Disciplinary Literacy and the Value of Making Connections” delves into the importance of stepping away from general reading strategies and instead turning to focused ones that can be used to make sense of texts from specific academic disciplines.
• Given the growing primacy of digital reading, “Extending Text-Based Strategies to Digital Environments” is a crucial article that teaches educators how to prepare students to apply their text-based reading strategies to a digital world.

Of course, just like every student, every classroom is also different. A concept that works well in one (or many) may be ineffective in another. The most important part is that educators never stop trying until they find the most effective strategies to complement each unique group of students.
Literacy Daily/ILA

Texts (and videos!) for ELA, Science, and Social Studies with scaffolds and higher-order questionsFind what you teach and great texts & videos to pair with it. Or add anything you like.
Click to explore the site and create your free educator account: www.activelylearn.com/

Population Explosion. 
In this activity, you will use a computer model to observe population explosions.
Can populations go out of control?
A population is a collection of individual organisms that can interbreed, such as a single species of gray squirrels or a species of dandelion.
In the natural world, such populations of animals and plants increase and decrease with changing environmental conditions. Over time, however, many populations are relatively stable. They don’t grow forever, and they don’t disappear.
Click on the link to explore the simulation

learn.concord.org/resources/658/population-explosion

 Science is taking on a greater role in helping students learn strategies for reading nonfiction texts. In the process, students are becoming more skilled in their ability to understand the text and the scientific content within it. Teaching nonfiction reading strategies helps students get more information out of a text and supports them in gaining skills that they will benefit from throughout the school year and beyond. 

Don't miss this opportunity! The trainings will take place at Grow with Google, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011
​We are offering 4 cohorts of this training.  Two will be a slightly slower pace for those new to Google or prefer a slower pace of technology instruction, and two at a slightly faster pace for those with more experience with Google apps.
For more information and to register to the series, CLICK HERE

​Critical Media Literacy Media literacy teaches learners how to access, evaluate, and produce media. Critical media literacy expands this by encouraging learners to define relationships of power and question social norms. Because youths are often unaware of the influence of media on their psyche, it becomes even more significant that educators utilize critical pedagogical approaches to aid learners in becoming critically conscious (Kellner, 2000; Yosso, 2002). It is important that literacy instruction supports learners’ ability to read myriad texts, in addition to how to read the world they live in as text. In a media saturated society, where youths are educated daily by and through the media they engage with, critical media literacy becomes a significant and impactful way to create critical consumers and critical producers and promote critical thinking

The Importance of task persistence
By Jenny Nordman
Students need to know that it is all right occasionally to become frustrated or discourage when reading. However, they also need to know how to encourage themselves to persists when this happens. 
Continue reading this article to learn about strategies to increase reading persistance. 

Celebrating Earth Day Collection

• Apple suppliers commit to using green energy 
• The history of Earth Day
• The global reaction to water and earth pollution 
• More people need to learn about cilmate change

How to Make a Quiz Work Harder for You. 
​When you give a test or quiz, do you basically just grade it, give it back to students, go over the answers, then move on? If you don’t do anything else with the information, if you don’t look carefully at how students answer your test questions, you’re missing a BIG opportunity.www.cultofpedagogy.com/aggregate-test-scores/

​To be literate, you must be able to not only read and write, but also speak and listen. “Literacy practices support learners by enabling them to grapple with ideas, share their thoughts, enrich understanding, and solve problems” (Krajcik and Sutherland 2010). This column describes numerous literacy practices that can help students master science vocabulary and have in-depth conversations about science topics. 

​The ideas students bring to class and their perspectives on what is happening in the classroom change constantly. Keeping track of these changes is useful for adapting lessons, nurturing student self-reflection, increasing student ownership of learning, and building a teaching practice responsive to learners’ needs. In this article, we discuss how a simple formative assessment tool—exit tickets—can be used to help teachers do this work.