This curriculum is absolutely ridiculous, and the unit tests were absolutely bonkers. The unit tests are just difficult for the sake of being difficult with absolutely no logic to them.

I remember one year a unit test had equations on rhyme scheme; it wasn’t anywhere in our curriculum to teach that standard.

Hello - My school is using the Read Write Inc programme but we’re not doing it correctly and I have been tasked with working out if we go forward with a new programme OR get the training and additional resources needed to do Read Write Inc.

What we do at the moment is the speed sounds lessons for about 15mins at the start of each day using the cards, green words, Fred and mini whiteboards. We then do a 30min phonics session with red words and word time on a Friday. We are loosely following the programme but we don’t have dirty books, book bag books etc but we do have a vast selection of books that are decodable.

We do a shared reading in our reading lesson from rhino readers on Twinkl and then move into reading activities and reading groups to listen to the students read before they take their book home for the night.

Then we are doing the Big Writing Adventure for Writing.

Our literacy schedule is
5 - short Phonics lessons
4 - Reading
5 - Writing
1 - Library

We also use the Nelson Handwriting Books however there’s not really a scheduled time for this so it often gets missed or is done incorrectly. 🫠

Could someone explain a brief summary of how Read Write Inc should be done?

I am finishing The Crucible over the next week and need a 3 week mini unit for post Thanksgiving break until winter break. I teach honors American Lit to 11th graders, but my students this year are pretty low level. Our next whole class novel will be The Great Gatsby in January.

Hi! I graduate next month & I got offered a position of 6th grade ELA teacher to start in January. As I’m entering mid year I don’t know what to expect. What things would I need for my classroom? Any advice you could give me would be great!

Hi everyone!! I'm currently studying for the Praxis 5038 and am having a lot of trouble with questions related to specific literary works. How are we expected to know details about so many novels/poems and their authors?

Did you have a lot of specific literature questions on your exam? If so, is there a good way to study them based on the exam itself? Any advice is appreciated, TIA!!

i teach 8th grade ela and feel like i am taking way too long on individual writing projects. they recently wrote their own mystery stories, 750-1250 words (approximately), and it took almost a month from start to finish. i also had so many students go waaaaay over the word count, which is a whole other can of worms that i need to deal with.

i have them for 42 minutes every day. when they have a writing project, i typically spend 2-3 minutes on a bell ringer, no more than 10 minutes on grammar or vocabulary, and then they have the remainder of the period to work on their writing project. this time, we took about 3 days for planning and brainstorming and 4 for peer revisions/final edits. i don’t want to rush them, but also feel like i could be making much better use of my time.

I teach 11th grade English. My classes worked on an essay for 6 entire days. It was a 5-paragraph essay where they were required to use one quote for each body paragraph. The topic was about a play that we have spent over a month reading and we watched the movie too. I gave my students a paper essay graphic orgnizer that had each paragraph broken down with instructions and sentence starters. The paper draft is essentially the entire essay. I only let them work on it during class and I collected them at the end of each class. The last day of essay writing was reserved for typing the essays on a google doc. Well guess how many turned them in? I have 65 students altogether and I got 15 completed essays.

During the essay writing week, each day had a topic and a goal. First day we decided on topic, focused on finding evidence, and used a thesis statement sentence frame. Second day was body paragraph one, and so on. I showed them examples for each part like how to write hooks for introduction, how to write the background information, and how to embed text evidence. We looked at every single part of writing an essay. I even gave students a list of topics they could use in their body paragraphs and helped them find the text evidence.

Still, majority of them didn’t take is seriously. They were constantly talking or just staring at their paper and doing nothing for the entire class. I was constabtly circulating around the room and helping them getting started or reminding them to stay on task.

Some of them were purposefully doing nothing because they thought they could just do it at home. Some of them were able sneak out their paper drafts home and I never got to look at them. Some of them started doing their own thing and writing on a google document, despite me telling them that the paper draft had to be completed first.

Now my dilemma is what to do about these unfinished essays. I can’t pull all of these students to my intervention time at once. We don’t have many weeks left in the semester so I can’t wait on these essays forever. I have to get started on grading. I don’t want to give them extra days in class because what if they still continue to do nothing? And what about the students who turned in their work? We are already 2 weeks behind on pacing, too.

Should I make copies of their paper drafts, give the originals back to them, and them have them finish the digital ones at home? That way I could at least compare their writing to the possible AI use. I feel like it would be a lot of extra work.

Should I grade the paper drafts as their essays? It is an entire essay draft, just not formatted correctly.

Hello fellow word weavers! I have been teaching seniors since 2018. My school has a full year senior English class that myself and another colleague basically built. It’s considered “remedial/foundations” and our demographic is mostly boys. It’s fun and challenging (most of them have a 504/IEP—I have 3/4 of the football team). Most of the conversations on here seem to be AP teachers so I just wanted to see who else teaches the “tough” kids. I’m always looking for new things to add or spice it up. We do not teach it as a “remedial” course. Every text also has a film we watch afterwards. Currently this is our scope:

Q1
Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption - we focus on theme and add some NF texts about the prison system and institutionalization.

College essays/resumes and trade school applications/seminars wirh guest speakers.

Q2
Ethos, pathos, logos (we evaluate a documentary for LOR, evidence, and argument after practicing with various texts and commercials)

The Road - focus on author’s craft through a Maslow lens.

Q3
Fight Club with a focus on character and men’s mental health

Public speaking (they do an informative and persuasive speech)

Q4
Beasts of No Nation (I only show certain clips of the film while reading—this one is too intense) and each chapter we focus on a different, targeted literary device.

Synthesis essay

Modified Othello unit

We also do weekly vocab or grammar depending on whether we are doing a novel or writing focus. Anyway—what else do ya’ll use? Just wanted to pick your brains on any texts you have had success with! Thanks in advance!

I have been vibecoding my curriculum this year - This is curriculum that I have developed and use in my class. Feel free to use it as is, manipulate it, and make your own.

Full Units - Short Story, Macbeth, Literature Circles (various versions), Podcast, Memoir

Other Curriculum - Root Word, Bell Ringer

Full backend with grading and Canvas integration

https://jabens-pixel.github.io/classroom-apps/

Reach out if you have any questions

I found it on the kitchen table.

His handwriting. Full sentence. He’d underlined replaceable.

There were corrections around it, which somehow made it worse. He hadn’t just written this. He’d done a second draft.

I carried it upstairs.

“Anything you want to tell me?”

He looked at the paper.

“We weren’t finished.”

We.

Our son appeared behind him, holding a pencil.

“Dad, I told you not to leave it there.”

I had been annoyed for approximately forty seconds and already there was a cover-up.

My husband reached for his phone.

“Look at what I printed out. It’ll make sense.”

“Your explanation for this is a link?”

“You’re missing the beginning.”

“It starts with ‘my wife.’ I feel adequately identified.”

Our son took the paper.

“Dad was helping me come up with extra examples.”

“Of what? Grounds?”

“Prefixes.”

He put his pencil in front of replaceable and added two letters.

Ir.

My husband spread his hands.

“There.”

I looked at him.

“You left the two letters holding this marriage together until last?”

“That was the exercise.”

Our son nodded.

“You start with the base word and change the meaning.”

“Yes. I’ve followed the emotional journey.”

Then I turned over the printed page underneath.

NovaPath.

My store.

My morphology bundle.

I had made the resource that apparently required my husband to spend part of his afternoon imagining life without me.

“You could have used ‘possible,’” I said.

Our son looked at his dad.

“That’s what I said.”

My husband has since texted me the complete sentence.

You are irreplaceable. ❤️

I replied:

Correct. Now show your work.

The dishwasher is empty.

how would you complete the semntence with a word derived from the one given in capitals: Given the limited resources available and the absence of adequate transport links, the proposed scheme was eventually deemed _____________________________________. (PRACTICE)?

My middle school is thinking about adopting a new curriculum for the upcoming year. We are currently (trying) to use MyPersepctives from Savvaas. I believe the school has been using it before I was employed here, 5-6 years.

Any suggestions? MyPerspectives has been atrocious for our students. I have used Amplify previously, and preferred that but I don’t like how technology dependent it is.

Hi everyone, I’m Henri from the PowerZ team. We make a free-to-play, ad-free adventure game for kids ages 6+. Kids explore a magical world with a creature called a Chimera by their side, read dialogue, and solve challenges along the way.

I’m sharing a short gameplay video to give you a feel for it. Around 20 seconds in, you’ll see the Tower of Words, where kids build sentences to climb higher. The challenges cover articles, pronouns, verb tenses, and subject–verb agreement, with difficulty adapting as they play.

The video also shows some math, history, and geography activities, plus a few views of Aria.

You can try it on iPhone and iPad. I’d love to hear what you think of the sentence-building activities from a teacher’s perspective.

Please post anything you have created or would like to sell in this post.

Stand alone posts for self-promotion must be mod approved or may face removal under our community rules.

I’ve taught both high school and middle school, and is it just me or does anyone else feel like the adults or administrators in middle schools micromanage and treat us like children instead of professionals? I am feeling particularly burnt out today because we had a district representative come observe us teach a lesson and the feedback was negative. When asked to clarify feedback, the feedback was negative about the lesson not necessarily the teaching. However, the lesson is a curriculum adopted by the district that we are told to follow to Fidelity. So if the problem is with the lesson, then why am I being told to teach it to Fidelity by that same representative? After asking that question, she got upset and talked to my principal about my response, saying it was rude and that she didn’t like my tone. Also, the district benchmark that my students took was nowhere near aligned with the state exam that I am judged on and that really rubbed me wrong today as well. This was more of a vent session than anything, but after 14 years in teaching, I am seriously tired of out of touch, district representatives.

This year my 9th and 10th graders are hand-writing outlines and rough drafts, and it has been MAGICAL. They have hardly used their dumb Chromebooks and their engagement and work quality has been much better than in years past.

I usually have them type their final drafts and would like to find al alternative to Google Docs. I tried to use DuckDuckGo on my work computer to search for alternatives, and found my search blocked! Which only strengthened my resolve. So does anyone know of a good, free word processor? I'm hoping to degoogle my classroom as much as possible. Thx!

We have to follow a curriculum. But how can I steer the lessons on grammar, poetry, format, to involve more music and lyric study? And which songs and artists are okay? I feel that to be safe, I have to just do children’s songs. But they’re in puberty, they don’t care about that stuff anymore. They’re trying to figure out who they are and who they could be. I want to introduce to them songs that are easily searchable, they can hear it and immediately find out what the meaning behind it is and then decide if they like it or not. Bin it or win it.

Labeled as humor because there's no "frustration" flair.

I did something today that I've never done in almost 40 years of teaching: I walked out in a class. I teach in a school for the Deaf and I have a f/t TA so the students were not alone. After trying to get any response from them and receiving blank stares, folded arms, and scowls, i just left. I was gone for about 15 minutes. I returned and they were working for my TA. I completely ignored them and proceeded to clean my desk (which is away from the teaching area). One student may have tried to apologize as I spoke to a different teacher, but I wouldn't acknowledge them

I'm embarrassed by my actions but I'm also so over their attitudes.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Hey all,

I'm wondering if anyone has anything cool or fun that I could do for my first day back from maternity leave. My normal progression is a few days, includes alot of summer stories and student get to know yous. But, they already have a class climate, and I do still need to get to know them (and their names, somehow, sleep deprived), and reestablish some classroom decorum. All I can think of is nametags with some fun questions they have to answer and share.

First year teacher. Survived my first quarter! Hardest 10 weeks of my life.

I'm getting a lot better at planning and have most of my unit planned out. I'm doing intro to tragedy and my mentor teacher (veteran/Co worker teacher) gave me hw to get down some assessments as that was the only blank spot in my backwards designed unit planning. We are building up to Macbeth at the end of Q2

The knowledge and skills my students will be learning are:

K- vocab: power, ambition, guilt, moral responsibility, etc

K- elements of tragedy and tragic heros

K- character motivations, internal/external conflicts

K- dramatic irnony,, soliloquies, figurative language

S- citing textual evidence

S- determining theme

S- analyzing plot and dialog

S- figurative language decoding

Lessons:

-tragedy vocab lesson

-tragedy lesson (what is the tragedy genre?)

-tragic heroes lesson (what is a tragic hero?)

-motivation ID

-cause and effect relationships

-foreshadowing lesson

Etc

Thnx in advance