Blog - The Owl Teacher

If you are looking for some great read alouds during this Christmas or holiday season, look no further! Check out these fantastic seasonal books that will engage your students!

Seasonal Books Your Students Will Love

I have a lot of books that I want to share with you regarding the holidays! Any regular reader of my blog would know I

Engage your students with these cheap holiday crafts for your elementary classroom.

More Holiday Crafts

It’s that time of the year when students are filled with excitement and focused on nothing but the upcoming festivities. You know the ones I’m

Create this easy DIY sock snowmen this year as your holiday craft in your classroom for an inexpensive and engaging gift to parents!

The Perfect Snowman Craft – From Socks!

Last year, I saw these adorable snowmen craft all around Pinterest! They were way too cute and I just had to give it a try.

Children love to ask questions; why not engage your students with this active engagement strategy of asking questions? Check out this questioning strategy.

Reviewing Content through the Questioning Strategy

During my last year in college, I “accidentally” took a geology course (stop me if you’ve heard this before…). I loved that class more than

It's important students are learning their multiplication strategies such as arrays, repeated addition, equal grouping, and skip counting. So why not make it engaging with these ideas and activities that you can download for FREE?

Presenting Multiplication Strategies with a few FREEBIES!

Several of the Common Core standards in third-grade math focuses on multiplication. In fact, I would say out of all the things you teach in

"I Don't Like Snakes" is a fantastic mix of both fiction and nonfiction elements that will engage your students as you teach about various science ideas.

MTM: I Don’t Like Snakes

I don’t like snakes. I never have. There is something about them that just creeps me out! So when I heard about this book, I

Teachers everywhere are expected to not only teach math fact fluency, but also math strategies in the elementary classroom thanks to common core. But is that the best strategy? And how do you explain this to parents? Check this out and see what you think!

Standard Algorithm vs. Invented Strategies

When Common Core came on the scene long ago there were many complaints (and still are today) regarding the invented strategies that teachers are to

Check out these engaging math workshop lesson plans and activities that are sure to get your kiddos excited about learning math! Who would've thought it was possible?!

Making Guided Math Workshop Work!

I love teaching in the math workshop format and have found it works very well in helping students be more successful with math. Math workshop

Text-To-Text connections. Theme. Personification. These are just a few of the reading skills that can be taught in your classroom by "Our Tree Named Steve!"

MTM: Our Tree Named Steve

Do you need a good book to use as a mentor text in reading this week? This week, my mentor text is “Our Tree Named

Do you want some engaging hands-on, science experiments to teach your elementary students about physical and chemical weathering? Look no further! Check out these science ideas!

Physical and Chemical Weathering Experiments

Team Weathering and Erosion are always working together when it comes to changing the Earth’s surface. Since recently I shared some hands-on erosion experiments, I

What should you do at Parent Teacher Conferences? This post has some ideas and tips on how to make your parent teacher conferences successful!

Tips for Parent Teacher Conferences

With parent-teacher conferences coming up, I was thinking about how important that first set of conferences are for the year. They either set the year

This fun and easy craft involves students writing their name in cursive to create the bones of a skeleton - perfect for halloween or any skeleton system unit! This blog post explains how to create it and provides a free download of bone attachments!

Cursive Skeleton Craft for Halloween Fun

One of my favorite activities that I like to do in the classroom around Halloween is to create the “craft” of cursive skeletons. I always

The Little Shop of Monsters teaches your students about writing narratives, word choice, and can even be used for teaching about comparing texts!

MTM: Little Shop of Monsters

It’s October — such a fun month in school. With Halloween around the corner, I thought “Why not align Mentor Text Monday with Halloween?” I

3 Ways to Stop Bullying in your Classroom

October is bully prevention month and so I thought I’d share some classroom management tips and ideas to help prevent bullying in your classroom. Let’s

This writing activity creates a bulletin board display that shares the consequences of bullying through a chain of events!

Chain of Consequences: Writing to Prevent Bullying

This week in class we worked together to discuss the consequences of bullying behavior on a person being bullied. First I started off by grouping