I first heard of Poet Prints Teaching, which is run by BC-based teacher Rachel (I can’t find her last name on her website), on my first day as a TTOC in West Vancouver. I was covering a Grade 4 class for the first week of 2023, and I connected with the other Grade 4 teacher at the school about lesson plans. She absolutely raved about the Poets Print Teaching Science units, and said that, thanks to this resource, she found Science to be the easiest subject area to plan for. Based on that recommendation, I bought and implemented the Grade 2 Poet Prints Teaching Force and Motion unit. And now, I, too, am a Poet Prints Teaching Science units evangelist! The lessons are easy to prep, engaging, and aligned with BC’s Redesigned Curriculum. There are units for every Science topic from Grades 1-4. Do yourself a favor and try one this year! 

This Math program, created by BC-based teacher Elyse Rycroft, contains EVERYTHING you need to teach K-3 math. The units are aligned with the BC curriculum and include so many hands-on activities, easy-to-use assessments (quizzes and evaluative tasks), and opportunities for meaningful application of the skills being taught. It’s so clear that Rycroft understands the type of activities that kids find interesting and the skills they really need to practice. Using Mindful Math will save you many hours of scrolling Pinterest, Instagram, and TPT—it’s like a one-stop shop for all your math needs!

I first heard of Gear’s work from one of my mentor teachers when I was a teacher intern. My mentor teacher was very knowledgeable—in her classroom was a shelf overflowing with professional reading. I’ll never forget how she pointed to that shelf and said, “Adrienne Gear has synthesized everything important from all of those books into Reading Power.” 

I (and countless other teachers) love Gear’s work because it’s practical—Gear was a classroom teacher for many years, and she really “gets” the reality of the classroom. The lessons Gear shares are simple to implement, yet invite students to think deeply and meaningfully about important ideas. 

One thing to note—Gear’s work on reading focuses on strategy instruction. I think it’s important to say that strategy instruction is only effective when students have enough background knowledge and oral language skills to understand what they’re reading. It’s difficult to make a connection or an inference, ask a deep thinking question, etc., when you have no idea what the words mean! For example, if I were to pick up an academic journal from a field I know nothing about—geology, let’s say—I would struggle to identify the main idea and supporting details or to make sense of the text features. But I could apply those skills while reading an article about teaching! I think of it like this: the basic understanding of what the text means is like the cake, and the comprehension strategies are like the icing and candles. With no cake, there’s nothing to ice! So, all this is to say—the lessons Gear and similar thinkers share are most effective when we use them with texts that the students have enough background knowledge to make sense of—e.g., texts that are connected to our content-area inquiry projects. We can’t expect students to apply comprehension strategies to texts on random topics. 

To get a sense of Gear’s work, peruse her blog linked above—you’ll find ideas you can use in your classroom tomorrow! I’ve also shared some examples of Gear-inspired projects on my Instagram. 

Teacher Sarah Hudson has created great resources to go along with many indigenous books! I used her Awasis and the World-Famous Bannock resources earlier in the year—my students especially loved creating their own maps inspired by Awasis’s journey. I’ve also used Hudson’s Strong Nations’ Northern Series resources as part of our inquiry on Inuit life. Hudson has created many simple-to-use, meaningful, and authentic lessons that tie in perfectly with the BC curriculum.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed when I see other teachers on Instagram with their Pinterest-perfect classrooms and activities that probably take longer for the teacher to prep than for the students to complete. Hillary Seides’ no-frills approach is a breath of fresh air in comparison. And her love for her students and drive to see them succeed shines through in all of her work. 

If you’re looking to be a great teacher while avoiding burnout, Teaching Without Frills will be your new best friend. Seides has a YouTube channel with short videos that you can easily incorporate into your Math, Language Arts, and content area lessons. She also shares lots of great ideas on her Instagram, many of which require nothing but blank printer paper! Best of all, for email subscribers, Seides shares monthly outlines detailing ALL of her lesson plans—her morning meeting activities and plans for reading comprehension, phonics, math, and writing. Some of the materials Seides uses are available for purchase in her TPT store (most don’t cost much and are well worth the money), and she also shares links to the YouTube videos and Epic books that go with the various themes and topics she covers.

As an undergraduate Psychology student at Western, I took a year-long 300-level seminar on Reading Ability and Disability taught by Dr. Debra Jared. Through this course, I learned about the Science of Reading, which has since come to the attention of the general public largely thanks to Emily Hanford’s important journalism. 

When I started teaching, although I had a theoretical understanding of the science of reading, I didn’t have the practical understanding that I needed to apply that science in my classroom—so I still found myself falling back on ineffective approaches, saying things like, “Look for the picture clue.” 

Reading Shifting the Balance by Dr. Jan Burkins and Dr. Kari Yates was a game-changer for me. I also took their K-2 online course and I can honestly say it was the best professional development I’ve ever done. Thanks to this book and course, I made immediate shifts in my practice—like using decodable readers for three of the four reading groups in my Grades 2/3 class (only about 25% of the students in my class are too advanced as readers to benefit from decodables); incorporating orthographic mapping in high frequency word instruction; and teaching students to decode EVERY word, rather than relying on other strategies that are less effective in the long term. Shifting the Balance is a quick read, too—I read it one evening over the summer. If you’d like to dip your toes into Yates' and Burkins' work, check out the blog and videos on their website linked above!

Laurie McIntosh is a Kindergarten teacher in Alberta. I loved Teachers These Days: Stories and strategies for reconnection, which McIntosh co-authored with Jody Carrington. 

I really admire McIntosh because of her honesty—she doesn’t hold back from talking about some of the hard parts of being a teacher and being a person. It takes a lot of bravery to be that vulnerable.

One of my favorite ideas from McIntosh is this DNA (Dreams, Needs, Abilities) activity. This has now become one of my staple back-to-school (or really any time of year!) activities. Another activity I love is having students come up with conversation starters inspired by Our Table by Peter H. Reynolds. This could make a great winter holiday or Family Day gift for your students’ families! 

Anna Geiger shares so many great user-friendly resources, many of which are free! 

Two of my favorite free resources on Geiger’s website are these number sense sheets (my Kinders a few years ago loved these!) and these sound sorts. 

One resource I’d recommend investing in is these high frequency word sheets that are designed to facilitate orthographic mapping. This is the best $15 USD I’ve ever spent! There are a million and one free high frequency word resources out there—what makes this one different is that IT ACTUALLY WORKS because it’s aligned with research about how our brains learn to read (hint: it’s not all about memorization after all!). 

This website ticks all the boxes. Free? Check. Simple yet engaging lessons? Check. Low-prep and no-prep activities? Check. If you’re a TTOC and ever find yourself left without a lesson plan, this website is a lifesaver! Here are a few projects my students have enjoyed: hot chocolate cards; sugar skulls; and Easter eggs!

First, let me address a common misconception: Daily 5 is NOT the same thing as literacy centres. The main differences are:

i. Daily 5 is choice-based. Students CHOOSE to read independently, read with a buddy, work on writing, do word work, or listen to reading (or whatever choices you offer). However! This choice is scaffolded. You DON’T just offer all of these options on the first day of school and hope for the best—that would be a recipe for chaos! The Daily 5 book by Gail Boushey & Joan Moser tells you exactly what foundation lessons to teach and how to build up your students’ stamina minute-by-minute to make this block in your day effective. 

On the other hand, teachers who use literacy centres typically assign students to a particular centre and tell them when to rotate. Which can work well! See below for more info about my own experiences with implementing literacy centres effectively in Kindergarten. 

ii. The Daily 5 activities are the same all year. On the other hand, literacy centre activities change frequently, requiring the teacher to engage in much more prep work and to continually teach the expectations for new activities. 

There are pros and cons to both approaches, and what I’ve found is that a big factor is the age group of the students you work with. 

I’ll be honest: I used Daily 5 in Kindergarten and found that it didn’t work well for that age group. The students just weren’t ready to spend time reading and writing with enough independence that I could simultaneously pull small groups. What I found worked better with my Kindergarten class was having students rotate through centres. I put them into differentiated groups depending on where they were in their progression as readers. The centres were: Scholastic sight word poems (the students would trace the high frequency word and draw a picture to go with it); guided inquiry-related literacy centre with the ECE I co-taught with; guided reading with me (knowing what I know now, I realize that it would have been more effective to have the students read decodable texts during this time, rather than levelled readers); Words Their Way sorts (if your school doesn’t have Words Their Way, you can fairly easily find similar resources online for free); and Starfall on the iPads we were lucky enough to have. We didn’t start these centers until after spring break—partly because I formed the groups using data that our Resource Teachers collected by doing one-on-one assessments of each student from January to March; and partly because, by that time in the year, the students had had enough practice with the Words Their Way sorts and the high frequency word poems that they could do these activities completely independently (unless, you know, someone got a nosebleed or something. It’s always a bit of a gamble in Primary!). 

However! I’ve found that for Grades 2/3 (and probably for Grade 1? I haven’t taught Grade 1 yet!), Daily 5 DOES work well! My students enjoy it; it requires absolutely no prep from me; and I am able to work effectively with small groups while knowing that the rest of the class is engaged in meaningful, authentic literacy activities that they can do independently.

A couple things to note: 

i. The first year that I used Daily 5 in Grade 2, I followed the “first days of school” plan exactly as it’s laid out in Boushey & Moser’s book. Based on that experience, I was able to tweak the plan to make it work for me in future years—so that it involved less carpet time and more variety in the beginning. Don’t feel that you need to stick to the script—make it work for you! (And this goes not just for Daily 5 but for everything.)

ii. I don’t use CAFE—in particular, as a believer in Science of Reading-based structured literacy, I don’t necessarily buy into the idea of teaching accuracy or fluency “strategies” as such.