March 2013 - Minds in Bloom

Grab these free sentence posters to hang up in your classroom! These posters cover three types of sentences: simple sentences, compound sentences, and complex sentences. The posters make a great reminder for your students to reference when they're practicing identifying types of sentences!

Simple, Compound, and Complex Sentence Posters – FREE!

I originally created these sentence types posters and handout as part of a task card product, but I have decided to offer just these four resources for free. Use them as a reminder to help your students understand these three types of sentences. If you are interested in digging a little deeper, then you may want to check out this double set of task

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Books about friendship are important for every classroom, whether they're the class novel you choose to read, the book you read aloud to the class, or options in your classroom library. Making friends isn't easy for every child, and some kids need guidance on how to make friends and how to be good friends.

Books about Friendship – Recommended by Teachers

Making friends is not easy for every child. If some of your students are struggling, or if you just have one of those classes that doesn’t get along, reading a pertinent book out loud could help. I asked my Facebook followers for their favorite books about friendship, and of course, they had all kinds of great ideas. Thanks so much to all who contributed! If

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Test prep task cards are immensely useful, there's no doubt about that. However, after making two sets of test prep task cards aligned to the Common Core, I decided to stop. Why? Because the sets were extremely challenging, and it made me realize that the Common Core is driven by testing and performance, not curriculum and instruction.

Why I Have Stopped Creating Test Prep Task Cards

Recently, I created two sets of math test prep task cards, one for grade 3 and one for grade 4. I designed the cards to align with Common Core Standards, which, quite honestly, was not an easy task. My understanding is that the Common Core Standards should be more than just checking off skills – students need to have a deep understanding of the concepts

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Spring-Themed ELA Task Cards (Autumn and Winter too!)

Here are three sets of season-themed multiple choice sentence ELA task cards that are perfect for reviewing some of the most common and important English Language Arts skills. Skills include: Parts of speech Prefixes and suffixes Punctuation Capitalization Complete sentences Homophones Synonyms Context clues Multiple meaning words Shades of meaning Complete sentences Many of the ELA Common Core standards are addressed, making this a great

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