By Rachel Lynette
Hi! I’m Lyndsey from Lit with Lyns, and I’m thrilled to be doing a guest post on Minds in Bloom. Over the past couple of years, I have become somewhat (ok, extremely) obsessed with using task cards in my classroom. It started when I purchased Julie Faulkner’s Cite Textual Evidence Teaching Pack that included task cards. Once I saw how engaged my students were, I
Wonder by R.J. Palacio is an amazing book on so many levels. If you have not read it, do it now. Like right now. Go to Amazon, download it to your reader, sit in the sun, or in the bathtub, or in front of a cozy fire, or wherever you like to read, and enjoy one of the best pieces of kid-lit, ever. NOTE: As Amazon Associates,
End of the Year Student Reflection School’s almost out! Grab these Free End of the Year Task Cards to keep your kids thinking right to the end. These cards are a great way to reflect on the year. Each one features a different prompt for discussion or writing! There are 20 prompt cards, plus four bonus cards that go a little deeper and require students
Ever wonder how you can use task cards with your students? This flow chart will help you target the activity that is just right for you! Start in the upper left. If you want more information or more ideas, you can find them in this Free Task Card Handbook. Click Here to see it large enough to read
Paraphrasing and summarizing are both super challenging skills to master, and what makes them even more confusing is that students often get these two skills mixed up! That is why I created the PARA and SUM acronyms:PARAphrase It! Put the text in your own words. Avoid copying the text. Rearrange similar text. Ask yourself if you included all the important points. SUMmarize It! Shorter than the
It’s hard to stay indoors during these last few days of spring before summer break, but you still have things to teach, and giving your students another recess is not going to fly with your administration. So why not take the learning outdoors? Here are some ideas for meaningful learning while getting your kids moving in the sunshine. For all of these, you will
I recently came across this awesome freebie from Literary Sherri. It will get your kids up and moving and can be used in so many different ways! Basically, you have your students form two circles, one inside the other with an equal number of kids in each one. The students on the inside face outward so that each one has a partner on the outside
Paraphrasing is such a hard skill to master – and so very important! Paraphrasing is essential for many kinds of writing. Kids who don’t learn to paraphrase well will not only grow into poor writers but may also even resort to plagiarism, which is not at all a good thing. Here is a step by step plan for teaching paraphrasing to your students. Start by
I just wanted to direct your attention to this awesome post from my blogging buddy, Anna DiGillio at Simply Skilled in Second Grade. She created a simple and clever way to use task cards in interactive notebooks! Not only that, but you can also download a free template from her post! Picture Credit: Anna DiGillio Please head over and take a peek. I am sure
We all know how motivating games can be in the classroom. In this post Adrianne Meldrum of The Tutor House shares some great ideas for using file folders, as well as a Halloween freebie! Thank you to Rachel for inviting me to write here on Minds in Bloom. Ever since I stumbled upon Rachel two years ago, I’ve been ever amazed at the high quality posts here
Your students already love task cards, so why not have them create some of their own (if you don’t know what a task card is, click here)? This would be a great project to do in conjunction with a book your class is reading or for a science or social studies unit. There are many ways you could go about this. Here are some things
Please give a warm welcome to Heidi of Counting on Words! She shares how she takes task cards and combines them with movement. I hope you enjoy this post as much as I did! The students in the urban school district where I teach spend much of their time away from school playing video games and watching television. You might think their lack of
I decided to write this free ebook because teachers often ask me for ideas about how to use and store task cards – or even why they should use them at all. There are bunches of answers to all these questions, so I thought it would be a good idea to put them all in one place. If you are new to task cards, this ebook will
This guest post from Samantha Harrell of Riveted Little Readers is a MUST READ for any teacher giving standardized tests. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year”…said no teacher EVER! State mandated testing…those words can be fighting words, I tell ya! No matter; state mandated testing is a necessary evil that we face every spring. How do we make it through this time
It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s a great way to review. Just mix the BOOM! Cards in with another set of task cards and put them into a BOOM! bin. Players take turns drawing cards and answering them. They get to keep the cards they answer correctly. But if a player draws a BOOM! card, he must discard all of the cards he has collected.
