I have a special place in my heart for first year teachers. I had absolutely zero idea how hard my first year of teaching was going to be. I knew it was going to be hard, but it was so much harder than I imagined. I don’t want to scare anyone! Admittedly, I was way underprepared and had a lot of things working against me. I’ll save that story for another day, though, because right now I want to focus more on the things I learned as a first year teacher and turn that into advice and encouragement for anyone going into their first year teaching. So, if you’re a…
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Summer Guest Post: How to Create a Butterfly Garden in 5 Easy Steps
Hello Friends- I am Tina from Teach the TK Way. I am the mom of 4 almost grown children, an Early Educator, and Teacherpreneur. I have been creating classroom environments for over 23 years, specializing in outdoor classrooms and bringing natural environments to indoor learning spaces. I can be found on Facebook and IGTV with my weekly “Mentor Minute”, where I share nature-based curriculum ideas with other educators. You can find me on ALL social media as Teach The TK Way; I look forward to connecting with each of you. Butterfly gardens, hummingbird plants, and saving the honey bees- OH MY! When I embarked on my outdoor classroom journey I…
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Summer Guest Post: Creating a Successful Classroom Management Plan
Cassie, from www.adventuresinbehavior.com, is a special education teacher in Texas and has worked for the past 5 years in an elementary behavior classroom for students with behavior disorders or autism. She has a Master’s degree in special education and a graduate certificate in Applied Behavior Analysis. Cassie is a self-proclaimed behavior nerd and loves to talk about all things related to behavior, coffee, and Harry Potter. We’ve all heard the horror stories of teachers being driven out of their classrooms and out of the education field because of student behavior! It seems like these stories are popping up across social media more and more these days and it can be so…
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Summer Guest Post: Five Things To Do When Designing Your Classroom
Katherine Rowe has taught high school science for five years and runs her blog, The Online Instructional Coach, on the side. Whether you are returning to the same classroom you’ve had for years or, like me, are switching to another classroom for the seventh time in a row (in five years), it’s that time of year when we start thinking about what we want to do with our classroom space. Pinterest abounds with ideas for themes from Harry Potter to Dr. Seuss, but if you really want your classroom to work for you, you have to go beyond the theme and think about the practical cues that will help your…
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Five Tips for Teachers Changing Grade Levels
As teachers, so much is constantly changing in our career. State standards, professional requirements, our students…there is so much change to anticipate from year to year! And sometimes, for various reasons, we even change the grade level we are teaching. For some this might be an exciting change; for others, not so much. I’ve changed grade levels twice in my career. I taught kindergarten my first year teaching because, well, it was a week before school started and that was the only job offer I had. I wasn’t really in a position to be picky! I had zero experience with kinder, and much preferred upper elementary. A year in kindergarten…
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Building a Strong Classroom Community + FREEBIE!
One thing that I never did much of until this year was focus on building a strong classroom community. I felt like I had good relationships with my students, but I realized I wasn’t very good at fostering my students’ relationships with their peers. How important that is! If students aren’t valuing and respecting each other, then it can be really hard to get much accomplished during the day. So this year, after learning more about Responsive Classroom and building classroom community, I decided to put that at the center of my planning. Allowing time for my students to interact with each other and encourage each other during class was…
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7 Tips for Classroom Organization in a Small Space + FREEBIE!
Anyone who knows me knows how much I obsess over keeping things organized. I am by no means a Type A person, but organization is necessary for my sanity. My third year teaching, I started a new job at a charter school that rented its space from a church. The church uses our classrooms on Wednesday nights and Sundays, so we have to break down our rooms twice a week. This wasn’t too much of a challenge my first year there as I was in a big room with lots of storage space. The next year, however, I moved to 2nd grade — and a smaller classroom with little storage.…
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3 Ways Student Engagement Makes Your Life Easier + FREEBIE!
I have a HUGE passion for student engagement. This passion has been a fairly recent discovery, though I’ve always loved making learning fun and felt that it’s important for students to love school. However, last year, in the middle of my fourth year teaching, I was feeling a little burned out and bogged down with curriculum and doing the same old thing every. single. day. I felt like I was failing my students and I sure wasn’t having any fun teaching. I was losing my why and feeling a little demotivated. I had been hearing a lot about the newly released book, The Wild Card, by Hope and Wade King,…
