How to Support Students With Reading Shakespeare's Plays

When I taught high school, I always ended the year with one of Shakespeare's plays, Romeo & Juliet for ninth grade and Julius Caesar for tenth.⁠ Students loved getting into character and acting out scenes from the plays. But it can be a challenge to make modern day connections with a text written over 400 years ago.⁠ Here's how I supported students with reading one of Shakespeare's plays.⁠

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Stocking Your Classroom Library: 8 Inexpensive (Or Free!) Possibilities

Building a robust, diverse, and inviting classroom library is something I truly enjoy. Spending lots of my own money on it is not. Students interests can change from year to year, so I am always looking for books that match those, and offering new books is a great way to keep reading enthusiasm high throughout the year. 

If you are building your classroom library or just starting one, you don’t have to spend a lot of money (or any!) either. Before you spend any of your own money, ask at school to see if money from the budget can be used to purchase books. If you get a yearly stipend for your classroom spending (I do), try to save your book purchases until you receive that. If you are spending your own money, consider setting a budget for yourself for each month or the school year as a whole. Read on for 8 places to purchase inexpensive books or get them for free.

6 Things I Tried This School Year

Last year I tried a number of new things related to how I organized and managed my classroom. You can read all about the 7 things I tried here. Some of the ideas stuck and I continued to use them this year, some of the ideas I modified to see if they would work better, and some of the ideas I dropped completely. 

Different things work for different groups of students, but also if it isn’t working for me as a teacher then it isn’t worth my time and energy to continue it. Just like last year, I tried some new things in my classroom this year and some were successes, but some still need work. Here’s a review of the 6 things I tried in my classroom this year.

4 More Ways to Prepare Students for Standardized Testing

Like it or not, standardized testing is not an educational fad that has come and gone. And even worse is that, as much as we like to tell students that a test score doesn't define who they are, those scores can have an impact on students' future. 

For my middle school students, those test scores determine which high schools they are eligible to apply to. For high school students, those test scores can determine which colleges they apply to and the grants and scholarships they'll be awarded. And if students seek education beyond a four year degree, those test scores can determine their eligibility for law school, medical school, and more.

That's a lot of pressure for students (and their teachers too). I try to alleviate some of that pressure by making sure my students feel as prepared as possible as we approach standardized testing (find other stress relieving ideas here). While that preparation has really been happening all year long through our curriculum, it can be reassuring for students when they know that the activities we are engaging in are explicitly prepared them for the upcoming test. I previously wrote about nine different ways to help prepare students and boost their confidence levels. Read on for four more ideas.