The third FLASH FREEBIE is The Hanukkah Candle. It is FREE for 24 hours! Grab it on TPT right now before the price goes back up! And be sure to follow me on TPT and Instagram to get all 12 FREEBIES in December!
This resource includes two texts – a non-fiction text that briefly explains the history of Hanukkah and a fiction story of a Hanukkah miracle. The story will warm the hearts of your students, and the non-fiction text increases their comprehension by improving their background knowledge. The resource also comes with text dependent questions to help students practice inference and summarizing, and Word Search for vocabulary fun!
Check out the video below for more information!
There are still 9 MORE FREEBIES in the month of December! Watch for more postings about them on this blog and at MsCottonsCorner on Instagram! And one brand new resource will be revealed in my TPT store. Follow me all three places to ensure that you don’t miss a thing!
And don’t forget to tell your teacher friends. Sharing is caring!
In the past year and a half, I have grown to love Google Forms. They are so versatile – you can include text, videos, photos… There are tons of different ways to ask questions, and they save me time because they are self-grading. What’s not to love? I use them for all the time. For more information on how to use them, be sure to check out this blog post.
Why digital instead of physical?
One of the things I most enjoy creating with Google Forms is Escape Rooms. I used paper Escape Rooms in my classroom before discovering the digital version, and I will never go back! Escape Rooms are so fun and engaging for kids – they forget they are learning! The key advantage of Google Form Escape Rooms is no prep. With the paper version, you have to print, cut, laminate, assemble, distribute…. You get the idea. Once a digital Escape Room is created, there is NO PREP! Just assign it through your Google Classroom, put the kids in groups, and away they go! For more about assigning Google Forms in Google Classroom, check out this blog post.
Escape Rooms teach content
Of course, an Escape Room is only as good as its content. My bestseller, Escape from the Lab uses texts and videos to teach students about the states of matter and to increase their comprehension skills of non-fiction text. It is a straightforward Escape Room that includes all of the information that students need to escape. Each section has a new lock, and the answers to the questions give students the code. I labeled this Escape Room B for Beginner because students do not need to solve difficult riddles and crack codes to be successful. Use this type of Escape Room if you haven’t done them with your students before or if you want the focus to be only content, and not include the extra layer of codes and ciphers. If students get the right answers to the questions, they will also have the codes and solutions for the riddles. These Escape Rooms are a similar challenge level – the content is on grade level, the codes are simple and all the information is clearly presented to the students
The Pet Nabber – an Escape Room type adventure about Number Sense
If your students are more experienced with Escape Rooms, I just finished creating Escape from Ireland, an adventure about the stories of Ireland. It’s perfect for St. Patrick’s day! The focus is on reading comprehension, so students read embedded texts and answer questions about them. The Escape Room includes a biography of St. Patrick that you can download for free on TPT! It also includes a retelling of the Legend of Finn MacCool, a fictional story about the Leprechaun King and 3 short descriptions of famous castles in Ireland. When you put those texts together with the storyline of the Escape Room, kids will be doing a lot of reading! The codes and riddles require some background knowledge, so this is rated I for Intermediate. I have filled this Escape Room with high quality photographs of Ireland, interesting texts and opportunities for critical thinking and problem solving. Plus, there are leprechauns and magic! What’s not to love!
You Decide Escape Rooms
Another type of Escape Room adventure is the choose your own adventure style. This is by far the most complicated type of Escape Room to create. It is not straightforward because the students make decisions during the activity, and each decision leads down a different path. These are incredibly engaging for for the kids, and I find that they play them over and over because they can have a different outcome each time! Escape from Plymouth Colony and Adventure in the Chocolate Factory are both this type of Escape Room.
Summary
Escape Rooms are versatile and easy to use, and kids love them! The varied formats, videos, texts, images, and adventure will hook them, and you will love the content and important strategies and skills that students can practice. Check out these digital Escape Rooms today and give one a try in your classroom. You will be glad you did!
Fifteen years ago, my dad told me that personalization was going to be the name of the game in education. As usual, he was right. What he calls personalization, we call differentiation. And it’s hard to do well. One of the things that I’ve struggled with is making differentiation easy for the teacher but not blatant to the student. We all know those students that shut down when they realize they are not at the same level as the others. That’s why I’ve started writing resources that look the same, but are at different Lexile levels. As Fountas and Pinnell have said repeatedly, a level is a teacher’s tool, not a child’s label. Read their blog post for more on that. https://fpblog.fountasandpinnell.com/a-level-is-a-teacher-s-tool-not-a-child-s-label
My goal with these resources is that you will easily be able to teach essential and/or interesting content while simultaneously differentiating the reading level for your students. And, they will be practicing on-grade level comprehension standards at the same time. Give them a try, and let me know what you think. Also, what other topics would you like to see? I’m working on one about the Northwest Native Americans right now, and have a couple of other ideas, but I’d love to hear from you about what you need!
Click here to go to my TPT store where you can buy leveled texts. If you follow me on TPT, I will email you whenever I post freebies on my blog! In the meantime, please enjoy this freebie Biography about Neil Armstrong (only available here – on TPT, you have to pay!). There are three Lexile levels – 800, 900 and 1,000. In the Common Core State Standards grade bands, 800 is about the middle of fourth grade, 900 is about the middle of fifth grade and 1,000 is about the middle of sixth grade. I hope this helps you teach essential and interesting content and differentiate at the same time!
