Your students are absolutely sure to be engaged in this informational text! This is an informative article written about the legend behind carving a pumpkin-- a fall favorite past time! The young and old alike love this activity! The article is 458 words long, complete with illustrations and captions that help to explain the information. Also, at the conclusion of the article, there is a six question quiz. The quiz has three multiple choice questions and two open ended questions, and one sequencing question. This text is sure to engage a room full of readers! A great read for your students!

Start the school year off right with a creative, top-ten countdown activity! Your students will love it! Students are able to introduce themselves to you and their classmates with a list of ten things to learn about them. Have fun and use this as an ice-breaker activity to get the year cranked up!

You are sure to engage your students with this informational text article entitled, "Will your shoes be filled with goodies or twigs?" This article is approximately 800 words long and includes text illustrations including captions with each. At the conclusion of the article, there is a formative quiz with nine different questions including multiple choice questions, open-ended questions, and performances-based scenarios. If you and your class are engaged in a study of Christmas Around the World, you will not want to miss this article!

If you are implementing a study of the different traditions of Christmas Around the World, this informational text article is for you! This article is approximately 800 words long and gives information in regards to Christmas traditions in Australia complete with dinner menus, decorations, and favorite pastimes. Additionally, the articles contains several illustrations complete with captions that compliment the text. At the conclusion of the article, there is a formative quiz complete with multiple choice questions as well as open-ended questions regarding the article. The last question is a performance based question where students will create a dinner menu for twenty-five guests based on relevant information in the article. Your students are sure to enjoy this study of Australia!

Your students are absolutely sure to be engaged in this informational text! This is an informative article written about the lighting of the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree in New York City. This article is approximately 934 words long complete with a couple of illustrations to match the text. At the conclusion of the text, there is a formative assessment that consists of an eight question quiz to include questions on vocabulary, comprehension, sequencing, context clues, inferring, etc. This text is sure to engage a room full of readers! A great read for your students!

This resource is a great icebreaker for welcoming each child back to school and it will also help to establish a community of learners in your classroom. Students will enjoy decorating these t-shirts with unique personality characteristics about them, illustrate, color, and then attach them to a clothesline already hung in the classroom. Get some really colorful clothespins to attach them to the cord serving as the clothesline! There are three different types of reproducible t-shirts included for the students to have a choice. One of the t-shirt patterns has established lines for those students who choose to write about themselves instead of draw, color, and illustrate important things about them! Kids will have a blast!

This resource is perfect for the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Enclosed you will find five pages of a short narrative story that has a certain rhyme and rhythm to it that students will enjoy! It is a story told from a young girl’s point of view about how she wishes for a horse for Christmas. She is reminded in the story that she will still have a great Christmas even if she doesn’t get a horse; however, she is convinced that one secretly hides in the barn for her. Her mom reminds her about many other children whose parents might very well be away for Christmas. This is a very old Christmas story and was published through Scholastic in 1968. Again, the students will love many teaching and learning activities associated with the story! This story lends itself to several teaching and learning endeavors such as: (1) the use of personification; (2) great vocabulary instruction; (3) sequencing; (4) point of view; (5) Descriptive Writing; (6) research and investigation of several different states discussed in the story; (7) the use of similes to make comparisons; and (8) making predictions about what will happen next in the story based on the context clues provided!

Show your students there is more than one way to express their words in poetry! In this packet, you will find eight mini posters each featuring a form of poetry to use when teaching each instructional format. Each poster also has an example of the type of poem explained. Students are sure to love writing these forms of poetry about their favorite topics. As well, this could be converted into a fall poetry unit utilizing the awesome fall scenes as springboards for brainstorming. Forms of poetry included are: limericks, diamantes, cinquains, haikus, couplets, acrostics, shapes, and free verse.

Here is an October word bank that will completely come in handy for a Writer's Notebook. This word bank is comprehensive of the many words that come to mind during the month of October and are sure to get your students' creative juices flowing! There are approximately 20-25 words that spur your students' brains for all kinds of writing-- narrative, expository, argumentative, etc. Use this October word bank for writing, ABC order, poetry, etc. It's uses are only limited by your imagination!

This is an awesome informational text article on the history of scarecrows and all of the different versions of scarecrows throughout the world. The informational text article is approximately 1,000 words long and includes illustrations to help better explain the text. One illustration includes a caption that can be discussed as a text feature. At the conclusion of the article, there is a formative assessment in the form of a quiz.

In this packet, there are eight writing prompts focusing on Abraham Lincoln. There are two prompts on each page and can be easily set up to use in writing centers or in whole group instruction. These are great tools as well for research and investigation. The prompts range from Lincoln's campaign to Presidency to his assassination. They are all somewhat open-ended in nature so that you, as the teacher, can dictate the length. Your students are sure to enjoy them!

A mini-poster your students are sure to enjoy! It's All About 100! *I can do 100... *I wish I had 100... *On the 100th day of school, I will... *In the last 100 days, I have... *In the next 100 days, I will... *A fact I can tell you about 100 is... *If I had 100 dollars, I would...

As your students prepare to go back to school from the Christmas holidays, this is an exciting resource that your students can make connections with for sure! This resource is an informational text article about the famous iconic series "The Love Boat." This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the show and the celebrations are being kicked off at the Rose Bowl Parade where the original cast members will be on "The Love Boat" float! This article is approximately 790 words long and includes a formative quiz which includes ten questions that range from multiple choice to open-ended formats. This is an awesome resource to review comprehension and get back into school after a long Christmas break!

You will absolutely engage your students with this wonderful informational text article that most every child can relate to. This is an informational text article about the Home Alone mansion being on the real estate market. The article is approximately 680 words long and is completed with several illustrations, including captions, to motivate any reader. At the conclusion of the article, there is a ten question formative quiz that ranges from multiple choice questions regarding vocabulary to open-ended questions which require inferencing and multi-step thinking! You can't go wrong in working on vocabulary and comprehension utilizing this informational text!

As the 100th day of school approaches, get all of your students excited about what they have already accomplished this school year as well as what is in store for them for the rest of the school year. In this resource, you will find a mini-poster for students to all involve themselves in some writing activities that include: a self portrait of what they believe they would look like in 100 years, a listing of the games that they believe that children will play in 100 years, a writing activity about what their hope is in the world of medicine in the next 100 years, a writing activity about what they believe will be available in the world of technology in 100 years, a writing activity about what life was like for a student 100 years ago, and what they predict their world will be like in 100 years. Many of these exercises are meant to be springboards for further research and study and more extended writing activities as well as performance based projects. Students will all enjoy this activity. When complete, you might display each students’ poster!

In this training and support packet of materials, you will find a powerpoint presentation that can be used for a professional learning community session, a focused faculty meeting, and/or a professional development session. There are a total of fourteen slides which encourage teachers to shift students into "high gear" thinking. The slides focus on the point that as long as students are involved in only memory and recall then they have trouble with "low gear" thinking! The point is made to involve students in "high gear" engaging activities, and they will grasp and retain much more than when asked to simply recall. This training presentation is a "jumping off point" into constructing/creating engaging teaching and learning activities!

I am hoping this resource will be most helpful to all of you! This is a set of incentives and reward coupons specifically for middle and high school students. For example, some of the rewards and incentives include: (1) being able to work in the front office for one class period; (2) gaining free admission to one ballgame; (3) earning the opportunity for you, as the teacher, to write a postcard to the students parents with a positive note in regards to the student, and many, many others. Many students need that extra boost just for someone to notice that they have done the right thing. Obviously, we all strive for our students to be able to self-regulate their behavior and ultimately that is our goal in using incentives and coupons that we can get to the point where external motivators are not needed! These incentives carry a March theme; however, there are others available for other months throughout the school year! Use these these incentives and rewards to help motivate students in your classroom. They can be laminated, cut apart, and placed in a storage container for safe keeping. There are hundreds of different ways for you to establish a management system for how a student will earn one of these so that is your task! There are seventeen different pages of incentives and rewards, and each page contains approximately 6-9 coupons/incentives on each page!

This resource is a mini-poster to celebrate the 100th day of school with your students. Each component of the mini-poster sets the stage for a thought-provoking response. Students must figure out what year they will be 100. They must say where they think that they will live and how they will travel. They must tell what they will be famous for as well as how they will communicate with family and friends 100 years from now. Finally, they must describe or draw a self-portrait of what they believe they will look like! Students will have a great time with this activity!

You are sure to want to use this informational text article with your students! This is an article about Abe Lincoln and his rise to the presidency. It is approximately 1,400 words long and has illustrations that match the text. As well, there is a ten question formative quiz at the conclusion of the article. Questions range from multiple choice to open ended short answers. Your students are sure to enjoy this text!

This is an awesome list of one hundred December words to use as a springboard for writing in December. These words will aid in narrative, informative, and argumentative writing as well as poetry! This sheet can be given to each student to place in his/her Writer’s Notebook!