Weekend Reading

Every Saturday, I'll be sharing my favorite reads from the previous week so you can meet some other fabulous bloggers that you may have missed or find some new teaching resources.

From the Blogosphere

• On Sunday, 5th grade teacher Nancy over at Teaching My Friends posted some fabulous suggestions for how to use all of the plastic Easter eggs that are undoubtedly on clearance these days.
• I've been following Emily Kissner's blog for quite some time, and she's been blogging about teaching inference this week on her blog In My Classroom: The Forest and the Trees. She's the author of two upper elementary resources that I love: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling and The Forest AND the Trees. 
• I loved hearing about this collaborative writing initiative using Google Docs over at Free Technology for Teachers
• Misty over at Think, Wonder, & Teach has been having guest bloggers all week. It's been a great way to discover some new blogs!
• Stephanie at Teaching in Room 6 shared a fantastic lesson that used a Revolutionary War-themed snowball fight to teach about independent and dependent clauses.
• Sandi, the media technology specialist at my school, posted a great collection of resources about teaching students to check the validity of online sources over at her blog, Teacher Technotopia. 

Off the Bookshelf

I'm preparing to redeliver a workshop about the Common Core English Language Arts standards to the teachers at my school, so much of my reading is related to that. One of the big topics we'll be talking about is assessment of the new standards, so I'm reading the How to Assess Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Your Classroom book by Susan M. Brookhart. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but I really like it so far. It's an easy read, but it has lots of practical ideas and suggestions for planning for and assessing each level of Bloom's Taxonomy. I can tell that this will be a book that I revisit several times even after I finish reading it.

What have you been reading or writing this week? Feel free to share links to your own blogs or those of others in the comment section below as I'm always looking to find new blogs to read throughout the week!


Have a great weekend!