Minds in Bloom

By Rachel Lynette

Expand the Use of Your File Folder Games!

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

[ Read More ]

Kid-Created Task Cards!

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

[ Read More ]

Get Them Moving with Task Cards!

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 physical

[ Read More ]

Get Your Task Card Handbook for FREE!

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

[ Read More ]

Test Prep with Pep: Fun Alternatives to Drill and Kill

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

[ Read More ]

BOOM! A Free Game to Use with Task Cards!

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.

[ Read More ]

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

[ Read More ]

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

[ Read More ]