Fellow teachers, I am participating in a HUGE Teachers Pay Teachers Resource Giveaway hosted by Teaching High School Math. The giveaway is divided into two parts, and you have the opportunity to win either a Middle School Giveaway Bundle or a High School Giveaway Bundle. These bundles are filled with the highest-quality resources from all subject areas, donated by TOP Teachers Pay Teachers sellers.
Summarizing is such a difficult skill for students.
This is a 2-week mini-unit on summarizing and finding the main idea (called finding the GIST) with expository text. I have used this in my classroom for the past 5 years, and students find this worksheet exceedingly helpful in scaffolding their acquisition of this difficult skill. The best part about this unit plan is that you get to choose your own texts, individualized for your own students’ interests and reading levels. I suggest using news articles (especially student news publications), but you can also use content-area texts, websites, textbooks, nonfiction books, etc. The sky is the limit!
This unit includes *TWO* sample articles and summaries to review and discuss with students. One article shows a shorter, 20 word summary, and the other shows a more detailed 30 word summary. Choose which is best for your students!
This meets the Common Core Standards for grades 6-12, and it is a cross-curricular activity.
Includes:
* Common Core Standards Addressed
* Learning Targets
* Lesson Plans
* Worksheets
* 2 Sample Articles
* 2 Sample Summaries
* Student Handout: A Shorter Way To Say…
* Feedback Oreo Poster (How to give constructive criticism)
Yeah! I am the Featured Teacher this week over on Lindsay Perro’s Blog! I feel so lucky and blessed! Please go check out her blog – she is a Top Seller on Teachers Pay Teachers, and she has so many fun and exciting math resources to help your class go ‘Beyond the Worksheet!’
TpT can really help you out of a jam. Are you sick? Have an unexpected absence? Looking for a new idea to spice up your unit? Have a great idea that will take you hundreds of hours, and wish someone could just do the legwork for you? TpT is the place to be! For extremely reasonable prices, you can find some amazing ideas generated by expert and veteran teachers from across the globe! If you know a teacher who hasn’t yet discovered Teacherspayteachers.com – introduce them to the teachers’ best friend!
So as you may know, I do sell my lesson plans on Teachers Pay Teachers. It has been a true blessing for me and for my teaching practice. I have learned so much over the past year by meeting and collaborating with other teachers, discussing important educational topics on the forums, and learning how to create engaging and targeted lessons. I always felt that my lesson plans were solid – targeted, authentic, scaffolded, and meaningful – but I never thought to take it the extra step to make it even more engaging. On TpT I have learned the value of graphic design. Color, proportion, layout – all of these things may seem frivolous at first, but they truly are not. Students live in a visual world, and anything we can do to make materials look more authentic, professional, and inviting is worth our time.
Creating lesson plans for other teachers to use has also taught me how to be more precise and clear. I always thought, “Well, I know what I’m doing and that’s all that matters. I don’t need to write down every little thing.” It turns out that ‘writing down every little thing,’ forces one to be more reflective and introspective, possibly generating ideas or seeing a new perspective they hadn’t considered. The monetary incentive of publishing my lesson plans (and fyi – I make very little, but I have been able to make a couple payments on my student loans) and making them available to others – having the honor of impacting students beyond my own classroom – has molded me into a better teacher. Period. I love Teachers Pay Teachers!
That being said, TpT is an incredible amount of work. I estimate that I spend at least 10 hours a week, on average, developing products, learning and communicating on the forums, on Pinterest, Facebook, blogging, responding to buyers, etc. It’s a part-time job for sure, and I can see how for the very successful sellers it can become a full-time job. I am constantly thinking about how I can do things better!
I wanted to share with you a new advertising page I plan to put at the end of my products. I want teachers who purchase my products to know that I have many wonderful lesson plans and units in my store that could compliment what they are doing in the classroom. I have it organized by Adolescent Writing and Adolescent Reading, even though we all know that they go hand in hand. Most products belong in both categories, but I placed them based on the primary Common Core goals of the unit.
The hyperlinks work on the final document, so if you are interested in any of the above products, you can download the advertising page here. If you are a seller on TpT, you may want to consider adding something like this at the end of your products to let teachers know about the many other wonderful products you have available for them!
