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#truestory and also… stressed and unstressed sylla

#truestory and also… stressed and unstressed syllables matter! 🤣

#spelling #brainfart #teacher millennial

TPT’s Back-to-School BONUS sale starts today! You

TPT’s Back-to-School BONUS sale starts today! You can get 25% off all Daydreaming-About-Data resources with code: BTSBONUS26

Today and tomorrow only!

My cart is ready! 🥳🤩

Practice is not always created equal. I don’t ke

Practice is not always created equal.

I don’t keep every choice up all year. I rotate the choices based on what we’re learning and how much time we have.

If we’re working on writing, the choices might be:
• Read
• Practice handwriting
• Free Write

If students are typing their writing, technology might be a choice.

During math, I might include:
• Fact fluency
• A math game

And I always consider how much time we actually have.

The goal isn’t simply to keep students busy until the next transition.

The goal is to keep them engaged in meaningful, high-yield practice.

The time students spend engaging in meaningful practice matters. I want my fast finishers spending those extra minutes reading, writing, practicing skills, creating, or reviewing something they’re learning!

Let’s spend less time answering “What can I do when I’m done?” and more time watching students independently choose meaningful practice?

Comment “finish” to grab my “When I’m Done” classroom display for free!

#classroomdisplay #teacherfreebie #classroommanagement #teachersofinstagram

Free choice time slowly dwindles as kids move up t

Free choice time slowly dwindles as kids move up through the grades, but I hold onto it as long as I can. In third grade, I make a solid effort to give them free choice every Friday—and every day the first week of school—because how we interact with others matters… AND impacts how much we can learn.

What are your thoughts? 💭

#freechoice #3rdgrade #beginningoftheyear #newschoolyear #iteachthird

The Science of Reading has given us the “what.” No

The Science of Reading has given us the “what.” Now we need to get better at the “how.”

The science tells us what tends to work. But knowing what works and building instruction that reliably works in a real classroom are two different things.

Science helps us understand the problem.

Implementation asks: How do we build something that works under real conditions?

And real classrooms are not controlled experiments.

We have students every year with different strengths, different needs, different levels of background knowledge, limited time, curriculum demands, interruptions, absences, and a teacher trying to make it all work.

And this is where teacher knowledge matters.

A curriculum can be evidence-based, but the teacher still needs to understand why the instruction works, what the students are showing us, and how to respond when they need something different.

Teacher knowledge closes literacy gaps.

When an evidence-based program falls apart in real classroom conditions, we too often call it an “implementation problem.”

But what if it is also a design problem?

An instructional program should not require perfect conditions to work. The people designing curriculum need to account for the conditions teachers and students actually face.

This is not an argument against the Science of Reading…. It is an argument for taking the next step.

We need both the science AND the engineering of literacy instruction.

We need strong research, usable materials, effective systems, and teachers with the knowledge to make informed instructional decisions.

We have invested heavily in understanding what works.

Now we need to invest just as seriously in making it work in the beautifully messy reality of actual classrooms.

#scienceofreading #teachingreading #teachersofinstagram #structuredliteracy

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