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.
If you teach second grade, you know that number lines show up everywhere: in addition, subtraction, place value, and mental math. A strong 2nd grade number line strategy helps students…
Building a classroom of readers is one of the most important jobs as a teacher at any grade. Literacy permeates every classroom activity at some level, and, therefore, needs be…
This elementary Thanksgiving unit helps students understand the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving and gives them tools to make connections between those events. By the end of the…
How do you teach expository writing in your classroom? I wish I could do it throughout the year thematically as we approach different content. We can do that occasionally, but…
We did a fun measurement activity on Halloween. We measured pumpkins in both centimeters and inches and figured out which measurement tool is the best for measuring different attributes of pumpkins. Day 2 we reflected on our learning and made some generalizations about measuring objects.
We started our measurement unit this Fall by measuring the attributes of pumpkins. Students had fun working with their team to explore their pumpkins AND this pumpkin activity made a great introduction to measurement. Get a FREE copy of the student sheets for this pumpkin exploration!
Second grade is a very important year where students develop fluency with two-digit addition and subtraction. It is the year that we work on a multitude of addition and subtraction strategies that students can use to solve problems.
October is the perfect time to study and write about creatures that come out at night. Bats, spiders, owls . . . this month is filled with creepy creatures that…
Our favorite October picture books for the primary classroom that are engaging, have good pictures and are well received by my students. These are our classroom favorites that I go back to each and every year during the fall season.
Phonemic awareness is a key component of early literacy development, particularly for preschoolers and kindergarteners. This skill is akin to an auditory playground where children learn to manipulate individual sounds,…
Teaching is stressful. After planning instruction all day long the last thing I wanted to do was plan for dinner at home. At the same time, our family needed to…
Some students, including English learners or impoverished children, come to school not having the academic language at their fingertips to express their thinking. They have great things going on in…
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