Tips for Overcoming Test Anxiety

Sweaty palms? Check. Racing heart? Check. A bad case of butterflies in the stomach? Check. It must be test time.

Many students struggle with test anxiety, but those feelings of panic and dread can be even worse for your English learners, students with disabilities, and struggling readers who struggle in the classroom. So what can you do to help your students relax and do their best on tests?

April Fool's Day!

What other day of the year do major websites, newspapers, and corporations have the excuse to spread laughable hoaxes? (One of my favorites was a few years ago when Google announced a new service: Gmail Paper, because, as they said, “Whatever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman?”) What other day can coworkers, kids, students, and parents get away with playing harmless pranks on each other? Though no one’s exactly sure how April Fool’s Day started, now it’s a holiday celebrated in many parts of the world with the aim to trick, fool, and get a few good laughs.

Are you looking for a good way to celebrate April Fool’s day in your classroom? We've got some ideas.

Thank You, Mrs. Pritchard

I’ve always had an active imagination. I used to make up games and friends and stories to keep myself occupied as a little girl. But when I was in third grade, my teacher Mrs. Pritchard taught me that a good imagination and creativity could be used for so much more than playing (though playing is good, too).

Mrs. Pritchard gave everyone in my class a spiral notebook. As a regular class exercise, we would each bring our notebook up to Mrs. Pritchard, who would open it to a clean page and draw random squiggles and designs with her marker. Our assignment was to turn the squiggles into a picture and write a story about it.

Five Best Practices You Need to Know

If your students used Imagine Learning English in 2009, you already know the difference thirty minutes a day can make. Now we've got a few extra tips to help them excel even more. Start off the new year by trying these five best practices that are sure to help meet your best expectations.

National Handwriting Day

Happy National Handwriting Day! It might not be an “official” national holiday, but people have been celebrating National Handwriting Day since 1977, when the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association established the holiday to “re-explore the purity and power of handwriting.”

National Handwriting Day is celebrated on January 23 in conjunction with the birthday of John Hancock, whose large, famous signature was the first to adorn the Declaration of Independence. It’s a wonderful day to celebrate and practice handwriting in your class—or to ponder the controversies regarding handwriting in schools today.

Motivating Students: Three Tips You Can Try

Do your students suffer from a lack of motivation? In the midst of holiday parties and on the brink of a break, it’s difficult to focus student attention on learning rather than plans of vacation.

Before you reach your breaking point, try these tips to motivate students and keep them interested in their own learning. Because once they can see their progress, students are more likely to want to progress. Take a look at these tried-and-true ideas teachers across the country are using to motivate their students.

Preparing for 2010

We all want to start out the new year right, so don’t let the winter break get in your way. As excited as your students may be for the time off school, they may not be prepared to fill all that time—at least not productively. We’ve prepared a few projects your students can start before they leave and can share when they come back.

For more ideas, check out last year’s activities, each designed to keep those literacy skills sharp.

New Year's Around the World

I hope all of you are enjoying the holiday season as much as we are at Imagine Learning! I can’t believe how quickly the holidays came this year. In only a few weeks we'll be starting off a brand new decade!

New Year’s traditions are so interesting to me. It’s amazing how one holiday can be celebrated in so many different ways. Every family, country, and culture has unique traditions and customs, and it's a lot of fun to learn about the different ways people ring in the new year.

Writing with ELs

Writing may seem like the last step in language and literacy development, but according to Katharine Samway’s book When English Language Learners Write, research shows just the opposite. Young children, whether native English speakers or not, can begin to write before being able to read and even before being orally fluent. Of course, children understand more than they are able to write, but even English learners are fully capable of expressing complex thoughts in writing.

With this in mind, we’ve searched for ways to help your ELs get their thoughts out on paper. Whether your students have never before picked up a pen or they’ve already got the basics down, this list of research-based writing activities has something for everyone.

History Speaks

What do Mount St. Helens's eruption, Lewis and Clark's expedition, and masking tape's invention have in common?

They each had famous beginnings in May. And not only that--we've got just the tools to make these historically significant events come alive in your classroom. Each event can be paired with one of our beautifully illustrated leveled texts and lead to some meaningful classroom discussion. Read on for instructions on accessing the texts and a list of topics worth talking about. Then let history speak for itself.

Teaching Poetry

Roses are red… and some poetry is stale. Celebrate April, also National Poetry Month, with a return to creativity.

Check out these classroom-friendly ideas on how to teach some of the more fun, lesser-celebrated poetry forms, including free verse, cinquain, and tankas.

Getting Familiar with RTI

There's been talk of a new player in the educational ring, and you'd do well to get yourself acquainted. If you haven't already, it's time you met RTI.

RT-what, you ask? RTI, or Response to Intervention, is all the buzz in the education world this year. And that's because it's bringing results. Good ones. The basic mantra of RTI is to monitor student response to the intervention methods you're using and then take action if students aren't responding well. While each school implements RTI in a stylized way, there are four basic components that are key to effective intervention. This month, we'll examine the first three and how Imagine Learning English meets each requirement.

Bring Difficult Narrative to Life

You wouldn’t give your 4th graders Tolstoy or Dostoevsky to tackle. And why not? They’d be left in the wake of complex sentences and compounds. So how can you avoid putting that same burden on your struggling readers and English Learners (ELs)?

While you may not be giving your ELs War and Peace, the transition from picture books to early readers to chapter books can seem equally daunting. If you’re looking to make difficult narrative more accessible, take a look at these research-based, helpful hints for the whole class.

Winter Break Writeups

As winter break approaches, teachers meet it with mixed emotions. The time off does wonders for you, but when your students come back hyped up on holiday treats—and their concentration completely derailed—it sometimes makes you wonder what happened.

Deter their mental meltdowns with six fun assignments designed to keep student literacy skills fresh over the break.

• Keep a holiday diary. Even if they just write one sentence a day about what they did, this will get them spelling words and composing sentences, and they’ll have the memories on record.
• Make a traditions list. Have them keep track of everything they do every year—or things they wish they’d do again next year.
• Read to a grandparent, younger sibling, or someone who could use the holiday cheer. Not only will they feel good for helping someone else but they’ll get good practice and probably some encouragement too.
• Choose books to read from a class list. When you give your students a list of books to read over the holidays, they may not read them all, but at least they’ll have an idea of where to go when they’re in the mood. Check out the Children's Choice books here.
• Complete a reading journal. Give them a fill in the blank printout, with prompts like, When I first saw the cover, I thought this book was about ___ and My favorite part was ___.
• Make up a carol. As they combine rhythm and melody, they may actually be humming when they write the lyrics down.

Rhyme on a Dime

As part of your Imagine Learning English package, two guides are included to make your life easier. The Resource Guide (for Level 1) and the Supplemental Guide (for Level 2) are each packed with printouts and activities to use in the classroom. Access them through the Imagine Manager icon on your desktop.

Look for future Resource Reminders in Imagine This! to highlight dozens of fun activities—all readily available and in your Resource Guide. This month’s reminder: rhyme books. They’re hands-on for your students and handy for you.

Rhyme books are a fun, easy, and inexpensive way to teach vocabulary and word families. Students learn principles of print as they fold their printouts into mini books with four rhyme sets each. Once students go through each rhyme book, they can create an original book using the same layout. See what kind of rhymes they can come up with on their own!



Download rhyme book printout

Make a Difference with Differentiation

For Halloween, some kids stick to scary, dressing up as goblins or witches. Others try a hand at heroism, becoming Spiderman or their favorite Disney princess. No costume looks quite the same, and that’s because every child is different. Their instruction should be too.

It would be nice if all your students responded the same to each lesson plan, but you don’t teach in a cookie-cutter classroom. When you differentiate instruction, you tailor it to fit the learners’ needs. You react responsively to individuals. It is a powerful tool, but one that teachers struggle to use as they face a classroom full of learners—typically spanning five years in reading ability. In this month’s final recommendation in our six-part series, Sorting Out EL Software, Dr. Paul McCarty reminds us how meaningful differentiated instruction is in the classroom, and how valuable is it in your EL software.

When a teacher differentiates instruction, she tailors it to fit the learners’ needs: she reacts responsively to individuals. She recognizes students’ varying background knowledge, readiness, language, preferences in learning, and interests and responds accordingly.

Differentiation is rooted in educational theory and research many years old. It is grounded in the work of Vygotsky, who described “the zone of proximal development” (ZPD). This is the range where the best learning takes place—the place slightly ahead of the student’s current level of mastery, where the student is able to profit from instruction rather than being either bored or overwhelmed. Researchers believe that in classrooms where students are performing at about 80 percent accuracy, they learn more and feel better about themselves and the subject they are studying.

Assessment can aid differentiation when it is used for more than just merely measuring instruction. It can identify a students’ “ZPD” and, when the assessment is computer-delivered, it can then identify appropriate curriculum. Imagine Learning English differentiates students’ instruction in at least four ways:

1. The placement test determines separate starting points in vocabulary instruction, literacy instruction, and oral language development.
2. It regulates or sequences instruction based on students’ performance. If, for example, a student has mastered a set of vocabulary words, three lessons in a row, the program will accelerate instruction, streamlining activities. On the other hand, if a student is not mastering a concept, the program will re-teach it.
3. The student can receive first language support which is strategically withdrawn as they become more familiar with each activity.
4. Students receive informative feedbacks tailored to their responses.

One way to view how Imagine Learning differentiates instruction is by observing a conversation between Imagine Learning English and an imaginary student named Miguel. Click here to see for yourself.