All this talk about social emotional learning may make you nervous. Sure, you say, I’m a professional…but I’m not a professional therapist. Fair point, but emotional intelligence can be taught–and you are a professional teacher. All this to say that this next skill, labeling emotions, is the easiest to teach using traditional (read: non-therapy) teaching methods. Labeling emotions comes down to developing and using an extensive emotional vocabulary. And whomever you are (assuming you’re a teacher), you have a lot of experience with expanding student’s vocabularies. Labeling Emotions: What it Means & Why it’s Important We label an emotion when we describe it using the most precise word we can…
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Sketch Your Genre Unit in 6 Steps
If you want to teach your reading curriculum through a series of in-depth genre units (if you want to implement genre study), here’s your planning mantra: Collect, Immerse, Teach, Notice, Define, Analyze. In this post, I’ll summarize each of the six steps and explain how you can organize your lessons (all lessons, even the ones that aren’t genre-specific) logically across a unit. Here we go! Six Steps to Genre Unit Collect Quality Texts: This part is all you, the teacher. When you begin planning your genre unit, collect a big ol’ stack of grade-level picture books from the genre (bring one of those plastic crates on wheels to the library…or…
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A Regular Person’s Guide to Creating a TpT “Brand,” Step 3: Create a Template for Product Covers
Now that you’ve chosen a color palette and a font family, you’re ready to create a template for product covers. Creating product covers has been challenging for me. I feel more confident creating resources than I do with the packaging (I’m not a designer!). I used to start from scratch each time I designed a cover. Now, I use a simple template for most of my covers. It looks something like this: This template gives me space for a title, a subtitle, and an image. The two text boxes prevent me from squishing as many words as possible onto the cover. Here’s how some of the finished products look: How…
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Understanding Emotions, Social-Emotional Learning (RULER, part 2)
Once we’ve recognized (noticed) our feelings, we can try to understand them. This can be more difficult then it sounds, especially at school. Classrooms are busy and emotional resources are stretched thin (1 teacher:26 kids). Understanding takes time and energy, and both can seem like limited resources at school. But there are things we can do to help ourselves and our students increase our capacity for understanding. Here are some tips: Ask Thoughtful Questions & Listen to the Answers Sometimes we need to talk through our feelings in order to understand them. When kids are overwhelmed by their feelings, they may need an adult to scaffold this conversation for them.…
