One of my favorite activities during the school day is reading aloud to students. I think it’s because I have such good memories of being read to and I want students to experience that as well. So of course I have favorite books to read aloud. I know you do too! One of my favorites…
October will be here before you know it, teacher friends! October is full of terrific themes that students love—and a great way to get activities with those themes and necessary skills are with ePackets. What’s an ePacket? It’s a small bundle of goodies from The Mailbox that you download and print. EPackets are inexpensive and…
On Wednesday this week, I’m leaving for a trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (the U.P.), where I’m hoping to see some fall colors and experience cooler weather. As you can imagine, we don’t have either of those things in North Carolina right now. The last I checked, the temperature in the UP was getting down…
I have always been an enthusiastic reader of fiction, in particular fantasy and sci-fi, but I have to admit that social media has changed my reading habits. I find that books don’t grab my attention like they did in the past, and I suspect it’s because my brain is used to the fast pace of…
What began as a legitimate blog topic has ended up being a cautionary tale on how you can’t trust the Internet, my teacher friends. While searching for a topic for today’s blog, I discovered that children’s book author Gail Gibbons has a birthday on September 1…or so I was led to believe. I put the…
Fall is coming! I can feel it in the air, and I can see it when I look at The Mailbox Magazine issues going live on our website September 1. (If you know me, you know that fall is my favorite season, and I end up rhapsodizing about it on the blog frequently.) So I…
I would be a huge fan of roller coasters if it weren’t for the height. In fact, I’ve been on indoor coasters that don’t have the height factor and I think they’re super fun. But you can just forget about getting me on a ride that begins with a slow creep up a near vertical…
This summer is the 30th Anniversary of The Magic Tree House! (It kind of blows my mind that 1992 was 30 years ago…but that’s neither here nor there.) The series, written by Mary Pope Osbourne, currently consists of 36 books. As a young adult, Mary traveled extensively and she was enthralled with the sights, sounds,…
Tomorrow, August 2nd, is National Coloring Book Day. Coloring can be relaxing for both children and adults—thus the popularity of adult coloring pages in recent years. (I printed this free adult coloring page here.) We also know, as teachers, that the occasional coloring page is a nice time filler and a quick assessment of a…
We all know that everyone goes back to school at different times. (If you’re in a year-round school district, you never really left.) But every summer I have a serious argument in my head concerning when to start posting back-to-school activities on social media. I was a Pre-K/K teacher and when someone would mention the…