Latest posts
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Not Everything Resolves…That’s Kind of the Point.
I want to tell you about the worst argument I have ever witnessed at a Thanksgiving dinner table. It was not about politics. It was not about religion. It was about a parking spot. My father, a man who is, in most other contexts, a perfectly reasonable human being, spent forty-five minutes constructing an airtight…
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The GoFundMe Activity: Crowdfunding Mastery in Any Content Area (Classroom Template Included!)
As you may have noticed, I’ve continued combing the wide world of the internet to find social media and/or website templates to manipulate into a tool for students to showcase their content mastery. While I’ve typically grabbed “safe” websites that feel like they have an obvious connection, today’s is something that came at me from…
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The First Thought Is Just the Beginning (Project Zero Thinking Routines Pt 4)
We are four posts into this series now, and I want to take a second to zoom out. Post One was about giving students the tools to recognize that they’re already thinking. Post Two was about teaching them to slow down and notice things… really notice them, the way you notice a piece of art differently on…
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The Funko Pop Summary: Where Biography Meets Box Art
Let me tell you something about my office. It is covered in Funko Pops. Floor to ceiling, shelf to shelf, every available surface. I have lost count of how many I own, but the number is somewhere north of embarrassing and south of intervention. My classroom alone has roughly thirty of them staring at my…
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Your Students Have Thoughts. These Three Routines Make Them Say Them Out Loud.
How many of us can relate to the following situation? Last year, I was teaching a unit on the Civil Rights Movement, and we had just finished reading a primary source, a firsthand account from a Freedom Rider. Heavy stuff. Important stuff. The kind of stuff that you want students to genuinely sit with. So…
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It Takes ZERO Thought to Snag These Templates
Let me tell you something that will either deeply resonate with you or make you close this tab immediately. I think about thinking. Like… a lot. Embarrassingly a lot. From reading philosophy and psychology texts, to staring into the void and wondering why my silly “lizard brain” likes to do things. It’s all thinking about…
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You Won’t Look Like an April Fool with These NEW Groupchat Templates!
About a month ago, I shared some social media templates both inspired by and missing from the epic collection amassed at Matt Miller’s Ditch That Textbook Website. If you missed that post, there’s a dating profile template, a Nextdoor template, and an Instagram profile page, all free and fully editable to use with your students!…
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…But Why are we Interviewing a Comma?
In 2008, American rock band Vampire Weekend shook the world by asking one simple question…” Who gives a F$%K about an Oxford Comma?” and my brain immediately thought two things: I do… What does the Oxford Comma feel about this song? I cannot be the only person who asks hard-hitting questions like this. I definitely…
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The Taboo Lecture!?!?!?!
Some of ya’ll may remember the game, but not the amazing commercial. As someone who’s obsessed with communication and language, one of my classroom staples has always been the physical game Taboo! The premise is simple. Get your teammates to guess a word or concept, but you cannot say any of the words on the…
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Stop the Scroll! How to Hijack Social Media Hooks to Level Up Bellringers and Exit Tickets!
We are in the middle of our 2nd day back from Spring Break, and getting the kids to re-engage is a struggle. How do we take them from 9 days of freedom and lock them back into the rigors and routines of a school day? If my students spent any part of their break as…