Friday Favorites

One of my favorite things about the teaching-blogging world that I've discovered during these months in which I have become involved is the willingness to share and support each other.  I love knowing that there are others, just like me, who love teaching - with all of its ups and downs - and have days so full that often things like sleep and time to exercise are sacrificed to fit it all in...yet are never too busy to share a tip or resource to make the days a little easier for others.  Whether it's a funny meme on Facebook or a poignient post communicating the real and troubling concerns about the path down which education is being steered, I love knowing we are negotiating the day-to-day challenges for teaching together!  For this Friday, I will be sharing with you some places to look for great resources to help with planning and creating fun and interactive lessons and activities for your students:

First up, you may have seen that one of my favorite blogs, Teaching Blog Addict, is celebrating its 2nd birthday this April!  Starting today, April 5th, you can go to this site and download literally hundreds of products that have been created for teachers - by teachers, and are absolutely FREE!  What a way to celebrate and share some love!  Lots of Middle School resources can be found within the 5th and 6th grade collection.  I've found some great things in the PreK- K and 1st-2nd grade collections to use with my little guy at home, too. Thank you, TBA, for such a fantastic opportunity to share.  Happy Birthday!!

Next, just in time for Poetry Month, Pam at Mrs. O's Rockin Resources has put together a Poetry Linky Party which already has tons of great materials and resources for all grade levels.  Take a moment to visit and check them out and/or share some of your products as well.  It will be time well spent, for sure! 

Lastly, I'm sharing with you a link to the Education section of today's New York Times.  In it you will find some fantastic ideas for teaching narrative, argumentative and informative writing - alligned with the CCSS - using baseball as a theme for this week's writing prompts.  

New York Times Writing Prompts

Common Core Practice | Narrative, Argumentative and Informative Writing About Baseball

The baseball season has begun, and our New Jersey classroom collaborators -- many of them passionate Yankees or Mets fans -- explored America’s pastime for this week's writing prompts.

Be sure to also take a moment to check out last Friday's post on Preparing for Testing and the Linky Party that is ongoing here.  There are a couple of great posts that have been shared, thanks to Erin at Miss Lifesaver and Kristy at 2 Peas and a Dog.  There's still time to share your ideas and tips as well.  Hope to see you there! :)

Helping Each Other To Help Our Kiddos

As promised, for this Friday's Favorite Find post, we will be doing one of my favorite things!  Considering that "Testing Season" is either newly here or right around the corner for many of us, we all know that the pressure's on - for us and for our students.  If there are ways that we can making preparing for our assessments a little more enjoyable, and therein make taking the tests a bit less stressful, let's share the love!

To start lending a helping hand, I am making everything available in my TpT and TN stores for 20% off  - and making my Common ELA Vocabulary Review Game Pack FREE in my TpT Store from now through this Monday, April 1st (No April Fool's joking going on here...I swear. Lol)!

**What Customers Are Saying**

"Useful tool."

"Another homerun!  Thank you!  I've also subscribed to your blog!  Great stuff!!!"

"Thanks for creating these fun and educational materials!"

Grab it for free while you can!

Please be sure to look around, grab a FREEBIE or two - and share with your colleagues, too!

For the following linky, create a blog post that shares an idea or tip that you've used or found that can help with content review or test taking strategies.  Are there things that you or your school district do to remove anxiety and motivate kids to try their best?  How do you use technology in your classroom to help prepare? Have you created products that make preparing for state assessments more enjoyable - games, activites, strategies and suggestions for home?  A free product, to start, would be awesome...then feel free to add links to a paid product or two as well.  Anything you are ready and willing to share will be greatly appreciated!

This Favorite Find Linky will start a little later this afternoon and be available to link to through April 6th, 2013 - so be sure to come back with a post that shares lots of helpful resources.  Then, look around for some new ideas to take back to your classroom!

To Link-up:

-Grab my Middle School Matters Blog graphic below to place in your blog.

(Please be sure to then attach a link back to this blog post using the above image.)

-Link up your post! :)

I can't wait to see all of the Favorite Finds we can share!  Thank you for trying this out with me.  I would truly love any feedback or suggestions for this Linky in the comments below.

Valentine Parts of Speech Fill-in FREEBIE

Let's hear it for some Parts of Speech-love for Valentine's themed review!

(Click on link to download Google Doc.)

Your students can complete a valentine for their mom.  The finished piece will not only be an expression of love that will touch both hearts AND funny bones.  

I hope that both you and your students have fun with this freebie.  I'm linking this post to Classroom Freebies' Manic Monday for February 4th.  Be sure to click on the link and check out all of the great resources available to you!

Also check out:

Giveaway Winner AND Valentine's Day Bookmarks FREEBIE

Thank you so much to all of you who participated in my very first giveaway here on Middle School Matters Blog.  Congratulations to Tina C.!  She will be receiving a FREE item of her choice from my TpT store.  If she is even half as excited about this as I am, the news has been a great start to her Monday morning!  I'll be doing something like this again very soon, for certain, so keep checking in. :)




No need to wait to get ready for Valentine's Day!  Alone or with other sweet treats added by you, these free Valentine bookmarks will hopefully encourage your readers to fall in love with a good book! With 4 different designs made with upper-grade students in mind, just download, copy (probably on cardstock, if possible, would be best) and cut apart to use these as a gift or prize on Valentine's day.  

(Click on the image to download.)

Sa-weet! :)

I hope you find this FREEBIE helpful.  I'm linking this post to Classroom Freebies' Manic Monday for January 28th.  Be sure to click on the link and check out all of the great resources available to you!

Thanks for stopping by!

Puzzle Me This...Prefixes!

I'm SO happy to share my newest FREEBIE with you!  I so love games and puzzles.  I know that my students do, too.  The challenge of solving this puzzle certainly helps motivate students to learn the meanings of the commonly used prefixes that are featured in this 12 Square Puzzle:

(click on the image to download it here)

Simply print one copy to place in a folder for an answer key. Then, print and copy the puzzle (on cardstock, if possible).  Have students cut the pieces apart on the dotted lines and mix up them up. To play, have them match the prefixes to their definitions to put the puzzle together.  Ready, set, GO!  This is great on its own, but it would also be a great addition to my Content Area Roots, Prefixes and Suffixes PowerPoint and Center Activities.  This pack also contains a chart of prefixes that are used in this puzzle.  Feel free to stop by TpT or TN to take a closer look.  The pack is 20% off today (1/21/2013) at both stores!

I hope you find this FREEBIE useful.  I'm linking this post to Classroom Freebies' Manic Monday for January 21st.  Be sure to click on the link and check out all of the great resources available to you!

Have a great day!!

New Linky Party - Favorite Finds

One of my blogging goals for this year is to make sure that I stay true to my original vision of Middle School Matters Blog.  I want this to be a place where, yes, teachers can come to find resources that may be helpful in their classrooms, but to also find a supportive community in which we can share things that motivate and inspire.  I want this to be a place where, knowing the challenges we are all facing in education today, we can find strategies to help work our way through some of the muck and mire that surrounds our profession, and still feel passion for what we do.

In an effort to start sharing some of my favorite things I've found that inspire me, I created Friday Favorites.  Last week, a fellow blogger, Erin of Miss Lifesaver, suggested that I turn this into a Linky Party.  What a great suggestion!!  I have taken part in many the last couple of months, but I've never held one myself.  Could I?  Should I?  Then I saw this on FB:

(from http://ow.ly/i/1nj5s)

Well...OK!  Here goes nothin'!

WELCOME to Middle School Matters Blog's first Linky Party!  I'm hoping to make this a regular event if this goes well.   I can't wait to see what happens!

First, here is my favorite piece of inspiration I've found so far this week.  It's a video clip of the 2012 Sports Illustrated Kids SportsKids of the Year. I've been frustrated as of late about the amount of attention being placed on assessments and test scores...at the expense of the time we have to teach all of the other things that are so important in the growth and development of our children.  This video is short on time, but long on examples of kindness, compassion, empathy, tolerance...love.  You know, all of the qualities that make up excellent people, not just excellent test-takers. ;-)  Take a moment to watch and be reminded that there is so much good in the world.  Then, show it to your students.  Have them talk about it, write about it, reflect on it and respond to it.  There are tons of ways that this could be used as a catalyst for all kinds of authentic writing practice that could easily be aligned to the CCSS for ELA.  It's my favorite find this week!

So, again with thanks to Erin for the idea...it's your turn! :)

Here's what you need to do to link-up and share:

1) Create a blog post that features one of your "Favorites."  This could be a lesson you've just done, a strategy that you've found successful - or want to try, a new website or resource, something you read or wrote...or something that simply inspires you or your students.

2) I'm posting this now to serve as a heads-up for tomorrow.  If you're interested, and oh, I hope you are...just follow my blog and come back to link up starting tomorrow, January 18th. The link will be open all weekend, so if you need to write something for this linky, you may be able to find some time.  

To Link-up:

-Grab my Middle School Matters Blog graphic below to place in your blog.

(Please be sure to include a link back to this blog post.)

-Link up your post! :)

I can't wait to see all of the Favorite Finds we can share!  Thank you for trying this out with me.  I would truly love any feedback or suggestions for this Linky in the comments below. 

I am posting this on Teaching Blog Addicts's Ultimate Linky Party Page.  Click above to find other opportunities to link-up and find resources to share! :)

Friday Favorites

So I'm trying something a little different.  As I've been learning more and more about blogging and all of the great teaching resources that are out there in the blogosphere, I'm realizing there is just SO much to see and so little time to really dedicate to exploring. This, my friends, is a great problem to have!  I'm adding more and more items to my Pinterest boards, but I also want to share with you some of my REALLY favorite finds and keep them in one place for you.

Each Friday I plan to share a link to a favorite blog post or resource that I happen to come across.  I'm hoping that you may also be inspired by my lucky finds.

To start, this week has been an unbelievably difficult one for so many of us.  Whether we are experiencing for ourselves the devastation that is occurring as a result of Hurricane Sandy, supporting friends and family who are in the midst of the disaster, or looking for a way to help as we see image after painful image of the desperate situation unfolding in the Northeast - many of us are physically and emotionally exhausted.  Courage is just one of many character traits that we are seeing so much of these days...and many are digging down deep to find it within ourselves.

With this in mind, I was so happy to stumble upon:
 

This blog, written by Maria Dismondy, is filled with all kinds of resources, including book trailers and teaching guides to books that she has authored.  My favorite part of this blog is her monthly linky party.  It focuses on a character trait as a theme for the month...and as luck would have it, November's theme is courage!  Her hope is that each month bloggers will link up ideas on how to teach these traits to children so that, as more ideas are shared, more children will be able to recognize these traits in others and develop them within themselves.

Talk about teachable moments - tons of them have blown in with Sandy!  I find that, in middle school aged students, it helps guide their understanding of concepts like this when they are given a chance to make personal connections.  If it relates to them...then it's valuable to consider it, read about it and write about it!  I love using current events for this purpose, and especially with the shift toward using nonfiction resources with the Common Core State Standards, collecting several news clips of true stories of courage to show as writing starters would be fantastic.  As in any natural disaster that brings communities to their knees, media coverage of Sandy has provided us a plethora of images and true stories of courage.  Gathering a few of these and showing them as a starter for students explaining what courage means to them, or describing an example of courage, would be very helpful.

For another idea, we've all seen the Values.com advertisements and billboards that promote character traits like courage.  On their website they have a page dedicated to courage and a space for students to design their own billboards.  Whether you choose to use this resource as it is, or develop a lesson around creating a "Courage. Pass It On." type advertisement, this would be a fun way for students to explore their own definition of courage and to share it with others.

Here is the {LINK} to her post explaining Maria's monthly themes and how her linky party works. You'll find other opportunities to link up as well.  I just couldn't wait to share the link with you as November is starting already and I'm sure that there are so many of you who have ideas that you could use right now.  Be sure to check out Maria Dismondy's Make a Difference Monthly Linky - my 1st Friday Favorite!