English & Language Arts Teacher BlogThis blog is for secondary English, ELA, and language arts teachers filled with lesson plans, humor, product recommendations, teaching ideas, tips, and tricks and much more! Gettin’ better every day! Helpful Stuff Here is a FANTASTIC form created by fellow TPT teacher-seller Lindsey Wildman that helps both teacher and student see why they got an answer wrong. This is priceless for clearing up any misunderstandings about vocabulary, what the question is asking, process of elimination of answer choices, and everything else! Get it for free here! Because through helping others, we all win! Recommendations (Full disclosure: contains Amazon affiliate links that may give us a small commission on products recommended here but does not affect your price at all! Thank you for supporting our small business!) Hot baths have always been a great activity for relaxation. Throw in some Epsom salt and it adds a little something more. Lately though, I have been experimenting with streaming YouTube videos of rain and birds sounds on a bluetooth waterproof speaker right next to my bathtub. And if some of you like thunder and rain sounds, check this video out! This is another level of relaxation, folks! It’s also a perfect opportunity for meditation, which can simply be focusing on your breathing and just observing your thoughts as they come (not judging or trying to control them, etc.) and letting them go. This is the newer version of the bluetooth shower speaker I have since the original has been discontinued. A game-changing tweak I discovered was to submerge my head (while facing upwards) just enough to where my ear canals were submerged but not my eyes. The calming sounds of rain and birds sounded so much fuller under water that it really helped me block out outside sounds of construction outside, as well as the little humans running around playing in the living room, haha.
A Little Inspiration ”Show me your calendar and your checkbook, and I will show you what your values are.” This is a potentially life-changing concept: let’s all look at how and where we are spending our precious & limited time and money and see if it truly aligns with our values. When I did this self-reflection, I discovered that I spent too much time when I got home after work cleaning and organizing instead of playing with my kids before they went to bed. I was spending about 45-60 minutes of the limited roughly 2 hours of free/play time I had with them every day cleaning instead of being present with them. Now I only do what is absolutely necessary for the next day like a smelly, full trash bag that needs to be taken out or a load of laundry that has been washed and needs to go in the dryer. As far as money goes, we realized how much extra money we were spending on personal shoppers fees to have our groceries delivered curbside that we decided to buy our groceries ourselves before/after work and on weekends. I hope these simple ideas can help you! As always, please forward this to any teacher that could benefit from this message and help spread the love! Leave a comment with Facebook below or can always message us on Facebook here. Keep changing the world, Charlie with Shining Scholar Education P.S. Consider joining our TPT Affiliate Program for 25% commissions here! Want to join our email list? Click below! MS ELAR teachers Click here! HS ELAR teachers Click here! And check out our TPT store here! We’re back at it again! But First, A Chuckle! What do you get when you cross a Software Engineer with an English teacher? A programmar. Helpful Stuff Not many things terrify students and fill my classroom with such agonizing moans quite like writing an essay. That is why I created this resource to help students brainstorm and outline their essay, breaking it down into smaller, more manageable chunks. The picture below shows what the handout looks like. Also, it’s FREE! Click to read more about this resource in this blog post. I hope this helps you and your kids!  Recommendations Ted Lasso has quickly become one of my favorite television series of all time. This guy is just wonderfully & hopelessly positive —but not in a cringey way, rather in an inspirational and feel-good way. I don’t want to give away too much of the show but let’s just say Ted Lasso is an American (played by Jason Sudekis with an endearing southern accent) soccer coach in England and is the show’s lovable underdog protagonist. He coaches, motivates, and inspires his soccer players in ways similar to that of a masterful and caring teacher. Here is a mashup of the best inspirational moments that could help you in your classroom. Warning: spoilers ahead! Enjoy! A Little Inspiration I heard this incredibly beautiful idea on Ed Mylett’s podcast: “Remember, you are the answer to someone’s prayers.” Let these inspirational words guide you and you do your best work this week. As always, please forward this to any teacher that could benefit from this message and help spread the love! Leave a comment with Facebook below or can always message us on Facebook here. Keep changing the world, Charlie with Shining Scholar Education P.S. Consider joining our TPT Affiliate Program for 25% commissions here! Want to join our email list? Click below! MS ELAR teachers Click here! HS ELAR teachers Click here! And check out our TPT store here! 4/17/23: A Pre-Writing Activity to Help Students Get More Familiar & Comfortable Writing Essays!4/17/2023 Seeing my kids struggle with writing essays is a problem I’m sure every English teacher faces more often than not. For my kiddos, the struggle seemed to stem from the idea that, after studying great essays in class, they see the finished products in their completeness without ever seeing every important step in the writing process. A lot of them usually think these polished essays are all written in one sitting, from start to finish, without any revising and editing. Can you imagine?! Not seeing the process in detail would sometimes overwhelm my students by their mind “filling in” what they thought the writing process entailed. I always like to point out that even the greatest writers: Stephen King, Mark Twain, J.K Rowling, and many others of my students favorite authors, write, write, and write some more. Then they keep writing. Along with revising and revising and then some editing followed by possibly more revising. I created this simple pre-writing graphic organizer as the bare-bones structure of the classic 5-paragraph essay. The picture below shows what it looks like.  More experienced writers can play around with the structure of the essay, but for struggling students I find that this template allows them to become more familiar and more comfortable with writing.
Feel free to build on this handout to suit your specific students’ needs! Every class period and every student has different needs so please make it your own! Leave a comment with Facebook below or can always message us on Facebook here. Keep changing the world, Charlie with Shining Scholar Education P.S. Consider joining our TPT Affiliate Program for 25% commissions here! Want to join our email list? Click below! MS ELAR teachers Click here! HS ELAR teachers Click here! And check out our TPT store here! Another week, another opportunity to get better! But First, A Chuckle! "My English teacher said I had to write 1000 words on the new Margaret Atwood novel. I managed to do about 35 before the librarian asked me to leave.” Helpful Stuff Here is a link to our free tutoring sign-in sheet on TPT to help you keep track of who shows up and when. Please leave a review if you found it helpful —the reviews really go a long way to help our store! Hope it helps! Recommendations Here’s a hard-hitting message I heard on one of my favorite podcasts recently, The Mindset Mentor with Rob Dial: just learning about how to improve is not actually improving. I have caught myself walking dangerously close to this land of comfy self-deception where thinking/learning/journaling about growing as a person is a pseudo-reward instead of actually using and applying the knowledge I’ve learned. The actual growth comes from the moment we almost lose our tempers, or we don’t bite our tongue, or we lack patience, etc. —basically every opportunity we have to improve our lives in the ways we want. This is POWERFUL. Instead of ONLY learning about what we should do and how we should do it (personal improvement), we need to capitalize and look for those moments in our day where we get to implement the strategies, tactics, and new ways of thinking that we have studied and learned. How often do we read or listen to a podcast and think to ourselves: “well, I’m done with my personal development for the day!” Let’s stop lying to ourselves because we are not helping anyone, especially not ourselves, by not looking at ourselves and our behavior honestly. Let’s seize the moment and start acting like our better selves! Here is the link to the episode (entitled “Life Is A Classroom”) on Spotify if you would like to listen in more detail! A Little Inspiration This is one of my favorite inspirational quotes by Teddy Roosevelt. Just think of the word “man” as “person” to be more inclusive! It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. ― Theodore Roosevelt As always, please forward this to any teacher that could benefit from this message and help spread the love & positive vibes!
Leave a comment with Facebook below or you can always message us on Facebook here. Keep changing the world, Charlie with Shining Scholar Education P.S. Consider joining our TPT Affiliate Program for 25% commissions here! Want to join our email list? Click below! MS ELAR teachers Click here! HS ELAR teachers Click here! And check out our TPT store here! Here’s to another fantastic week of touching hearts and changing lives! But First, A Chuckle! What do you say when your English teacher is crying? "There, their, they're." 😂 Helpful Stuff How many of us have had students that constantly say: "I hate reading". I’ve always felt that the students are not necessarily lying but that they truly do believe that they hate reading. It could’ve come from a negative experience with a teacher or a student in English class —either way the result is that these students feel that they don’t enjoy reading. Thankfully a reliable remedy that I found throughout the years is piquing their interest with first few lines of books. This is how it goes: I collect a stack of books from my personal library in my classroom. This is a wonderfully eclectic collection of books I’ve collected from donations, Goodwill (usually for a dollar!), and yard sales. I physically gather as many books as there are students and I simply stand in the in front of everyone and get their attention. I then read the “hook“ that is in the first line of the book in my best movie-trailer-announcer-voice to really draw in the students. This works fantastically for fiction books, specifically YA novels, because the authors are experts at gripping their attention from the first line. For non-fiction, it really helps to ask intriguing questions about the book’s subject. For example, I have non-fiction, biographical and autobiographical books about the inspirational and motivational life of superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The following links are affiliate links for Amazon meaning that we may get a % of the sale price but it does not affect the price YOU pay at all :).
And for older kids there are these 2 *fantastic* books: Dwayne Johnson (Star Biographies) by Abdo Kenny and Who Is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson? by James Buckley Jr. (Author), Who HQ (Author), Gregory Copeland (Illustrator)
Helpful tip: if you know multiple kiddos will want the same book, I would recommend having a few copies. Recommendations Let’s take a moment to ask ourselves what are we really after? For example, I really wanted the sound of flowing water in my classroom but I wasn’t crazy about the idea of having a desktop water fountain to provide the soothing sounds of flowing and bubbling water. I soon settled for something that got me my end goal without having all the hassle and responsibility of cleaning and maintaining a water fountain: I simply bought a, album in MP3 format that I play on loop on my classroom computer! So I get the end result that I was looking for, wonderfully calming sounds of flowing water, without the additional responsibility and hassle of having one more thing on my to-do list which is cleaning and maintaining a desktop water fountain. I tried the YouTube videos playing in the background, but there is nothing more jarring and jolting than having soothing water sounds at a high volume only to be interrupted by a much louder mid-video ad! Here is a link to the album that I purchased entitled “Bamboo Water Fountain Sounds” on Amazon Music. I would like for all of you to join me in asking ourselves: “What is my end goal and how can I achieve the same result with perhaps a smarter and more efficient plan?” A Little Inspiration There’s a great story I’ve heard in many different places and it basically goes like this: One morning, there’s an old man going for his morning walk along the beach. Off in the distance, he could see a small boy approaching him. As the old man gets closer, he notices the young boy is repeatedly picking something up and throwing it into the water. When the old man is finally able to see what the boy is doing, he discovers the young boy is throwing starfish back into the water. The man asks him what he’s doing and the young boy says, “I have to throw the starfish back into the water because the tide washes them up to the beach and they can’t return to the sea by themselves. And when the sun gets high, they’ll die and that’s why I’m saving them by putting them back in the water.” The old man says, “But there must be tens of thousands of starfish on this beach— you won’t really be able to make much of a difference, will you?” The boy bent down, picked up another starfish and threw it as far as he could into the water. He then turned around smiling at the old man and replied, “Yes, but it made a difference to that one!“ As always, please forward this to any teacher that could benefit from this message and help spread the love! Leave a comment with Facebook below or can always message us on Facebook here. Keep changing the world, Charlie with Shining Scholar Education P.S. Consider joining our TPT Affiliate Program for 25% commissions here! Want to join our email list? Click below! MS ELAR teachers Click here! HS ELAR teachers Click here! And check out our TPT store here! And for our more mature teens this realistic biography is great: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: The People's Champion - From WWE to Hollywood by James Romero |
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