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! Let’s get back out there and keep making a difference! 🙌 Helpful Stuff It’s important to remember to practice the fundamentals of reading before moving on to more advanced reading strategies and comprehension. Just like pro basketball players master dribbling & basic free throws before moving on to the more advanced stuff like dunking & other complex plays, we must prepare students by routinely practicing the foundations of reading comprehension. One fundamental strategy to help you teach reading and increase student comprehension is to have students practice active self-monitoring while reading. Recommendations What makes better writers? Writing, writing, and more writing! Check out this fantastic *FREE* resource from fellow TPT’er Mondays Made Easy: Creative Writing Prompts Story Starters Activity - Daily Writing Journal Prompts Try it out and let us know how it goes! Don’t forget to tag us in your posts on Instagram as @shining_scholar_education and Facebook as Shining Scholar Education! Because through helping others, we all win! A Little Inspiration The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you. -B.B. King As always, please forward this to any teacher that could benefit from this message and help spread the love!
The goal of these messages is to help ourselves improve—for our students, for our loved ones, and for ourselves. 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! Let’s make it count! 💯 Helpful Stuff To conclude our series on building relationships with students (don’t worry there will be more unique tips in future emails!) this is our last tip for connecting with & building relationships with students. Attend student events outside of school Attending extracurricular activities outside of school helps create a bond with students because of a few things:
I know attending these things at first can seem like just another timesuck in your already overcrowded teacher calendar. But even if you can just make 1 or 2 events a semester, the students will notice and that time will also be a “deposit” in the relationship back account with your students that will pay off when you make a “withdrawal” in the classroom! Recommendations
They are even ready to be used as emergency lessons plans for substitute teachers! Reading selections in this bundle include: 1. “Sorry, Right Number” by Stephen King (12 pages total) 2. “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” by Rod Serling (24 pages total) 3. “Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe MS version (19 pages total) 4. “Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe HS version (22 pages total) 5. “A Glow in the Dark” by Gary Paulsen (11 pages total) 6. “Incident in a Rose Garden” poem by Donald Justice (6 pages total) 7. “The Man Who Cheated Death” by Carlos Salinas (16 pages total) 8. “Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe (10 pages total) 9. “The Cremation of Sam McGee” poem by Robert Service (12 pages total) 10. “The Raven” poem by Edgar Allen Poe (7 pages total) Click here to check out a preview and/or buy the Halloween & Horror Bundle! Also, check out this FREE Halloween Paragraph Writing - Prompts for Opinion, Informative, & Narrative by Rachel Lynette on Teachers Pay Teachers! Try it out and let us know how it goes! Don’t forget to tag us in your posts on Instagram as @shining_scholar_education and Facebook as Shining Scholar Education! Because through helping others, we all win! A Little Inspiration A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. -Henry Adams As always, please forward this to any teacher that could benefit from this message and help spread the love!
The goal of these messages is to help ourselves improve—for our students, for our loved ones, and for ourselves. 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! Let’s have another great week! Helpful Stuff
Here’s another great tip to foster better relationships and make students more comfortable and therefore more likely to learn (while enjoying your class!). Use & Develop Your Sense of Humor Of course, use your best judgment with this advice (always keep it appropriate and G-rated no matter the age of your students) but a little effort and self-knowledge can really make your classroom come alive! Tip: focus on your strengths and your personality. You ever notice the funniest people have zeroed in on their own funniest qualities? Mr. Bean mastered physical comedy with hardly any dialogue. The Impractical Jokers’ comedy style is witty & self-deprecating. What are your strengths and personality traits/quirks? For example, I love, love, *love* wordplay, specifically puns! Recently my students have been talking about a subreddit dedicated to thalassophobia, the fear characterized by a persistent and intense fear of deep water. Here is one of the best videos! Anyway, the students asked me how scared I would be to be in that ship in the video and why? I responded: “My fear is that would be thalasso me you'll see.” The laughter started with a trickle then it became fuller as more students caught on, lol. From then on some students would really pay attention to the sounds of words, especially long ones, to see if they could make a joke, too! Even if it’s not something you come up with on your own, it could be a funny movie clip or YouTube video that ties into your lesson, just always keep an eye out for shareable laughter! Here is how one English teacher shares his humor with his students and here is a wonderful article teaching you the different types of humor (hopefully you find what suits you best!) along with examples. Recommendations Now that the weather is changing, I added this little suction cup bird feeder to our classroom window and it’s pretty cool to see the birds *AND* how the students react to them! To make it even cooler, I got this awesome one-way window privacy film so the kids can get really up close and personal with the feeding birds! Safety tip: to prevent these precious birds from flying into the window due to the privacy film, we only placed the film on the bottom 10 inches and have the blinds cover the rest of the window. This cool little piece of nature in your classroom might even inspire some great literary works from your students! Try it out and let us know how it goes! Don’t forget to tag us in your posts on Instagram as @shining_scholar_education and Facebook as Shining Scholar Education! Because through helping others, we all win! A Little Inspiration “One book, one pen, one child and one teacher can change the world.” - Malala Yousafzai As always, please forward this to any teacher that could benefit from this message and help spread the love! The goal of these messages is to help ourselves improve—for our students, for our loved ones, and for ourselves. 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! Because what we do matters! 🙏 Helpful Stuff Share Personal (but Appropriate) Stories One of the simplest methods for engaging students is through personal storytelling. I remember telling students stories about my tricky lawn mower that would start and stop randomly, the tiny teacup chihuahua that ‘bit’ (felt more like a pinch really, haha) my ankles once when I walked to check my mail. Funny enough they remember these stories years after they had left my class and I see them adulting in the real world. My kiddos enjoyed laughing at my funny stories of my confusion in bilingual education, struggles in school & the workplace, and they also saw a more human side to their teacher. It lets them know that we struggled with awkwardness, with conflicts in friendships, and just growing up in general. The stories about my struggles in English class helped student learn the importance of grit and perseverance. The irony that I am now an English teacher myself seems to tie up the story very nicely for my students. (I know this because they tell me, haha) Try it out and you might be pleasantly surprised! Recommendations Here are some of the best books I have used for SSR, independent reading, reflection journals, and any other activity where you need scary short stories! The short length and easy reading levels are key selling points to students! (The following links are Amazon affiliate links, but don’t worry, it does not affect your price at all :)) Check out our FREE universal reading assessment & writing activity for a quick assessment of student understanding & comprehension! Also, what student doesn’t love stickers? Especially cool Halloween ones?! Even my too-cool seniors feel proud when they get a smiling jack-o'-lantern on their papers! This value pack of 880 Halloween-themed stickers is the best deal I could find! Try these out and let us know how it goes! Don’t forget to tag us in your posts on Instagram as @shining_scholar_education and Facebook as Shining Scholar Education! Because through helping others, we all win! A Little Inspiration No one is coming to save you, there is no such thing as a hero, there is only you deciding that you are worthy. Marine Ashnalikyan As always, please forward this to any teacher that could benefit from this message and help spread the love!
The goal of these messages is to help ourselves improve—for our students, for our loved ones, and for ourselves. 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! Let’s get back out there and make a difference! Helpful Stuff Journaling about current events, feelings, thoughts, and anything else in their lives. Have them make connections to what they are studying in class. Writing short stories? Have them write about where they see themselves in 2, 5, 10 years! The trick is to really have them Beas accurate as possible: where do they live? In a house, apartment, RV, etc? What’s their main source of income? Hobbies? What kind of friends, social circles, and relationships do they have? Reading a story about betrayal? Have them journal about a time they felt betrayed. The possibilities are truly endless and while sometimes the connections may not be as tight as we would like, it does help student engagement better than no connections at all! :) Try it out and let us know how it goes! Don’t forget to tag us in your posts on Instagram as @shining_scholar_education and Facebook as Shining Scholar Education! Because through helping others, we all win!  Recommendations As Halloween is around the corner, check out these standard-based & teacher-created reading tests for the quintessential horror story, The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe! Click here for the MS version and here for the!HS version! A Little Inspiration No one is coming to save you, to give you permission, to choose you, or to validate you. This has always been your job. You must love yourself so fiercely and fully that you have no choice but to be strong for yourself, to fight for yourself, to be yourself, and to build yourself. -Cara Leyba As always, please forward this to any teacher that could benefit from this message and help spread the love!
The goal of these messages is to help ourselves improve—for our students, for our loved ones, and for ourselves. 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! |
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