I love using word sorts to teaching vocabulary because they’re an extremely effective strategy to teach vocabulary and very engaging to students. Word sorting is a research based method that allows students to build their knowledge around a set of vocabulary words by sorting and classifying them into groups depending … Read More
Remember playing the Memory card game as a child? This game works great to help students memorize academic vocabulary. You play by matching vocabulary words to their definitions. By trying to remember where the words and definitions are it forces students to think about the vocabulary more than they … Read More
If you’re anything like me, you were required to read educational journals and magazines in order to research and write papers in college. Then, once you graduated and got a job as a teacher you’ve struggled finding the time to do this kind of reading. I decided to start a … Read More
As a 4th and 5th grade elementary teacher, I’ve spent the last 10 years teaching everyone else’s children to read. I can’t tell you how excited I was this year, after my wife and I had our first son, to sit down and read with him! Before he was born … Read More
Flashcards can be a tremendous memorization tool but they can also be a tremendous headache if not organized methodically. Here’s a little math problem to put that into perspective: You’re a teacher with 30 students and each student has a set of 30 flashcards. If you do the math 30 … Read More
Milli, centi, kilo, gram, meter, liter, inch, quart, pound, standard, metric… I have a difficult time keeping all of this measurement vocabulary straight, let alone my students! Over the years I’ve come up with a few strategies for helping my students organize all of this terminology in their minds. Hopefully … Read More
When teaching reading, especially to ELL students, I always found myself struggling to find strategies to help them understand the meaning of new or difficult vocabulary. For the purpose of this post I’m going to focus on my ELL students because they usually seemed to have the most difficulty, but … Read More
Who is Mr. Elementary? Welcome to the blog of Mr. Elementary! I have taught 4th and 5th grade in the public school system for 9 years. I have my master’s degree in curriculum and instruction with an additional endorsement in ESOL. My family consists of my gorgeous, adventure-loving wife who … Read More