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ELA/Reading

Our Favorite Graphic Novels for the Classroom

You’ve gotta love a good graphic novel. The quick pace, fun images, and quirky dialogue make graphic novels incredibly engaging for both adults and kids.  After taking on the black sheep role in acceptable literature, graphic novels have made a fierce comeback. Now graphic novels are a staple in the

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Teaching Theme in Upper Elementary

5+ new ideas for teaching themes in upper elementary. Use these suggestions for activities, scaffolding, projects, and review to give your students a firm foundation for identifying themes in literature. Although theme can be interpreted as a single central idea, here at Fun in 5th Grade, we define theme as

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2 Unique Strategies for Teaching Main Idea

What’s the big idea?  It may have been a go-to line for the Three Stooges, but many upper elementary teachers are asking the same question to their students almost every day and have been for many years. Today we are going to provide two brand-new strategies for discussing and identifying

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close reading for every season

12 Months of Close Reading

12 Months of Close Reading A Year of Literacy Lessons: Close Reads by Month Reading never goes out of style, and here at Fun in 5th Grade, we have close reading passages for all seasons. From Football in the fall to Mardi Gras or even some Sweet Treat history for

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How to use Educational Flipbooks for Digital Learning

No matter how many new ideas enter the educational world, one thing is for certain… New content is going to be introduced to students…obviously.  But learning new content is hard for many students, and for most, organizing it is even harder.  Using educational flipbooks while teaching new content is exactly

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Must Haves for Upper Elementary

3 Unexpected Ways to Use Task Cards

Task cards remind me a lot of cards from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Each card has a task or question on it, and the task cards can be used in a variety of ways. Let’s be honest, if you have been teaching elementary school for a while, you are

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Teaching Text Structures: Helpful Hacks

Learning text structures helps students begin the process of analyzing information and questioning the purpose of the texts they read. As students get older, knowing their text structures allows them to determine the goal of the writer and decide whether a text is appropriate for their tasks. (i.e., a research

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40 Figurative Language Examples for Upper Elementary

If you’d rather watch paint dry than come up with figurative language examples and activities, give your brain a break because this post will leave you feeling like a kid in a candy store! This blog post contains 40 figurative language examples that will make you cheer like a teacher

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Close Reads with Mystery Pictures are going DIGITAL!!

Close reads have just gotten trendier. In true 2020 fashion, the Close Reading resources with Mystery Pictures that you know and love are now going digital! Close reading strategies are taught to help students explore a text more deeply by digging into the text multiple times, but these aren’t just

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