If you’ve been following Ms. Gina’s comics on Educatedly, here’s some news: those classroom moments are getting room to breathe into something longer. We’re turning the Teacher Life stories into a book — same Ms. Gina, same honest classroom chaos, just with more space to tell each story properly. Think of it as the comics’
Ms. Gina’s Comics Are Becoming a Book Read Post »
Geometry has arrived on Educatedly! We’ve added five new lessons for upper elementary, all built around one simple idea: look closely, compare, and name what you see. Here’s what’s new on the site: Math These five lessons pair naturally with our existing Area vs. Perimeter lesson to form a short geometry sequence for grades 3-5:
5 New Geometry Lessons Just Added to Educatedly Read Post »
What Is Reciprocal Teaching? Reciprocal Teaching is a structured way of discussing a text in a small group, where students take turns leading the group through four specific jobs: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. Instead of the teacher asking all the comprehension questions, students learn to ask them of each other and of themselves —
Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Comprehension Strategy Built for Struggling Readers Read Post »
What Is Phonemic Awareness? Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and play with the individual sounds in spoken words — no letters, no print, purely by ear. It’s noticing that “cat” is actually three separate sounds (/k/ /a/ /t/), or that “sun” and “sit” start with the same sound. It’s easy to confuse with
Phonemic Awareness: The Reading Skill That Starts Before Letters Read Post »
What Is Place Value? Place value is the idea that a digit’s value depends on where it sits in a number. In 47, the 4 isn’t just “four” — it’s four tens, or 40. Swap the digits to 74, and that same 4 is suddenly worth 4 ones. It sounds simple once it clicks, but
Place Value: Why It’s Hard, and How to Teach It So It Sticks Read Post »
What Is Counting On? Picture a student solving 6 + 3. The long way is counting every single object from 1: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… 7, 8, 9.” Counting on skips that first count entirely — the student starts at 6 and just counts forward three more: “6… 7, 8, 9.” It sounds
Counting On: The Math Strategy That Replaces “Counting Everything” Read Post »
What Is Number Sense? Number sense is a student’s flexible, intuitive feel for numbers — knowing that 8 is close to 10 but far from 2, that you can break 7 into 5 and 2, or that counting backward from 20 is faster than starting at 1. It’s not a single skill so much as
Number Sense: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Teach It Read Post »
Why It Works Most of us praise students with quick phrases like “good job” or “nice work.” It feels encouraging, but it doesn’t actually tell the student what they did right. Behavior-specific praise (BSP) fixes that by naming the exact behavior: “Nice job raising your hand before you spoke.” Studies have found that this small
Behavior-Specific Praise: A Simple Classroom Management Strategy Backed by Research Read Post »
Why It Works Teachers form impressions of students early — sometimes within the first few weeks of school — based on things like past grades, behavior, or even how a student communicates. The problem is these early impressions can become self-fulfilling. When a teacher expects less from a student, they tend to give that student
Maintaining High Expectations: Why Believing in Every Student Matters Read Post »
Why It Works A lot of classroom behavior problems happen simply because kids don’t know exactly what’s expected of them yet. Setting expectations means clearly stating, ahead of time, what a task or activity should look like — how to sit, how to work, what “done” looks like. Frontloading (sometimes called priming) takes this a
