Author: Jessica Boschen

Jessica shares her passion for teaching and education on What I Have Learned. Jessica has 16 years of elementary teaching experience and currently homeschools her two middle school boys. She enjoys scaffolding learning for students, focusing on helping our most challenging learners achieve success in all academic areas.

Science

Science Phenomena Stations: Teaching NGSS Phenomena

Hold up a cold glass of water on a hot day and ask students why it “sweats,” and you’ve started a science lesson the way NGSS intends: with a phenomenon….

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Writing

Nonfiction Daily Sentence Practice to Support Paragraph Writing

Most nonfiction sentence practice looks the same: a worksheet with a few unrelated sentences to fix, expand, or combine. Students complete the task and flip it over. The sentences don’t connect to…

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Writing

Daily Sentence Practice with Connected Stories for 3rd & 4th Grades

Many 3rd- and 4th-grade classrooms have a stack of sentences waiting for students every morning. Students fix them, turn them over, and forget them by lunch. Daily sentence practice has a reputation…

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Early Reading

Emergent Reading Activities for Kindergarten and 1st Grade

In any kindergarten or first grade classroom, you’ll have readers all over the map, some naming letters, some blending their first words, and some not quite sure where a sentence…

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Writing

Expanding Sentences: Activities and Routines (Grades 1-5)

Ask a young writer to describe their weekend, and you’ll often get “It was fun.” Teaching expanding sentences is how you help students turn those bare-bones sentences into detailed, interesting…

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Life Science

Animal Senses: Super Senses and Sense Organs Explained

A dog can smell a snack from across the house, and a hawk can spot a mouse in a field from high in the sky. Those everyday wonders are a…

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Physical Science

Types of Energy for Kids: Forms of Energy Explained

Energy is one of those words students hear all the time, but ask them what it actually is, and you’ll get a lot of shrugs. Teaching the types of energy…

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Physical Science

Conservation of Matter: Experiments for 5th Grade

When a candle burns down, or a tablet fizzes in water, students assume the matter has disappeared. Teaching the conservation of matter is how you replace that idea with the…

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Science

Claim, Evidence, Reasoning (CER) in Elementary Science

Ask a third grader to explain a science answer, and you’ll often get “because I just know” or a single guess with nothing behind it. Teaching claim, evidence, and reasoning…

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Math

Place Value Games: Dice and Card Games by Grade Level

The fastest way to turn place value practice from a worksheet into something students actually want to do is with a handful of dice and a deck of cards. Place…

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Math

How to Teach Place Value in Elementary School

Every elementary teacher has watched a student read the number 42 as “four, two” instead of forty-two. That small moment is the whole reason place value matters, and it’s why…

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Math

Open-Ended Math Questions: How to Use Them in Grades 3-5

The first time I put an open-ended math question on the board for my third graders, half the class sat frozen. They kept asking, “But what’s the answer?” They had…

Read More Open-Ended Math Questions: How to Use Them in Grades 3-5

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