A TRC Original, Words They Need To Know: A Book of K-3 Sight Word Activities by Sheron Brown and Sally Oppy, is intended for use by primary teachers, reading specialists, and classroom volunteers. This professional resource is easy to use, addressing the management of sight word activities and materials, as well as how to fit sight [...]

Take a peek inside a TRC original resource, Make a List. Using word lists based on the events and characteristics of each month throughout the year, the authors mine the background knowledge and personal experience of students to build writing skills and appreciation. If you’re in the thick of Writer’s Workshop or have never tried it, this book also offers helpful advice and suggestions to help your students become strong writers!

The Poem of the Week Book I by Betsy Franco offers a variety of fun lessons and activities to reinforce basic reading skills. Easy to use and well-organized, this book would be a welcome resource in any classroom!

I spent some of my professional development time over the last couple of years studying how best to reach our ELL students. In our area, we have Hispanic and Russian/Ukranian populations. I don’t speak Spanish or Russian – I took German in high school against everyone’s recommendation, but I haven’t run into any students who [...]

Tangram Alphabet: Building Letters With Tangrams is a deceptively simple conceptual resource for teachers. It’s a quick read, and all the more valuable for the possibilities it offers students across the curriculum. If you’ve not used tangrams in your classroom before, they are pieces taken from a square; the pieces are called tans. The pieces fit together to [...]

Interactive writing is used in teaching the early phases of writing, primarily with students in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and grade levels 1 and 2. In the interactive writing method the teacher and student share the pen, writing to each to each other in letters, dialog journals or using a message board. Kids choose their own topics and how long the text will be.

Hands-on templates for picture sorting, helping students hear and feel the sounds of the words, and word sorting, helping students see the patterns of the vowel sounds within words.