While the concept of “explicit teaching” is not new or revolutionary, my school has been focussing on it heavily over the past couple of years. The emphasis is that it’s not just our instructions that should be explicit, but our class discussions, small groupwork and one-on-one teaching moments with individual students needs to be highly explicit [...]

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I was lucky enough to be selected to attend the Google Teacher Academy in Sydney, Australia on April 20 and 21. The Google Teacher Academy (GTA) is a free professional development experience designed to help primary and secondary educators from around the globe get the most from innovative technologies. Educators who wish to attend the GTA [...]

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I am currently in my eighth year of teaching. In that time I have taught Grades Prep, One and Two and have taken on a variety of different leadership roles within my school. I have learnt so much about children, education, schools, leadership, teaching and learning in the past eight years, and I feel I am [...]

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Part of my role as the Literacy co-ordinator at my school is to run the classroom helpers program. The course comprises of three one hour sessions, focussing on how parents can help with oral language, reading and writing in the classroom. This year there were around 30 parents who participated, the majority being parents of [...]

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Schools in Victoria, Australia begin their holidays next week. It’s been a ten week term for us and although it has gone very quickly, I feel I achieved a lot with my students. I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect on the teaching and learning that has happened so far this year. Highlights [...]

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I have been blogging recently about the modified Daily 5 program that I have implemented in my classroom. Along with the Daily 5 activities that my students complete each day, we are also introducing and explicitly teaching a variety of reading strategies from the CAFE (comprehension, accuracy, fluency, extending vocabulary) model. Last week I blogged [...]

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Last week I blogged about how I have implemented a modified version of The Sister’s Daily 5 literacy model. Read about my two hour Literacy Block here. It is still a work in progress and I will continue to review how things are working to meet the needs of my students. Last week we introduced the strategy [...]

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After hearing a lot about the Daily 5 last year, Kathleen Morris and I purchased the two books, The Daily 5 and The CAFE Book, by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser. Better known as “The Sisters“, they have developed a literacy structure that aims to build reading stamina, foster independence and develop a love of reading in students. [...]

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In my eight years of teaching, spelling is the area of literacy teaching that I find the most contentious. I have found that there isn’t a lot of consensus about the best way to teach our young students to spell. Teachers tend to change their preferred method of incorporating spelling into their programs and each [...]

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