Following Directions TEST - A Tricky Following Directions Lesson. FREE Fun for April Fool's Day, too! Give this following directions test to your students, and try not to laugh too much when they are taking it. If they don't read the directions first and do what the directions say, they will be shocked at the end to find out they only had to do number one...write their name! Great test preparation activity to get kids ready for exams too! Enjoy! - HappyEdugator

Confusing Words Beat the Clock PowerPoint game. A fun interactive way to practice identifying commonly confused words. (there, their, they're) Students are given two sentences and have thirty seconds each to identify the correct confusing words that go in each sentence. They can work with a partner and use wipe-off white boards or write the answers down on paper. After time is up, the answers will disappear. (Timer is built in) Click again to check answers. Advance slide with another click to start with a new set of sentences. Grades 4 and up. Supports common core for frequently confused words! 36 sentences in all. - HappyEdugator

Multiple Intelligences Book Review. Multiple intelligence assignment menu for reviewing a book or story. Great differentiation. Students choose 5 boxes from the assignment menu and are also required to complete one reading response. Students may choose from verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, musical-rhythmic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, or naturalistic intelligences. - HappyEdugator

100 Book Projects and Activities you can have your students do to accompany the books they have read and to foster a love of reading. A list of ideas to get you started on having a fun year sharing about fiction and nonfiction books.

Parts of Speech TEST. Comprehensive assessment of student knowledge of the parts of speech. May be used as a pretest, a formative assessment, or summative assessment. EDITABLE for your own classroom use only. This is not a multiple choice test. Students will have to write and construct responses, which is a critical thinking skill. - HappyEdugator

Behavior Management Warning Cards. Classroom management tool.. Slip quietly on a desk and don't stop teaching! Be prepared for the beginning of the year or anytime you need a behavior plan. Explain to your students when they come back to school at the beginning of the year that you will expect them to follow your classroom expectations. Give them examples of positive and negative behaviors Tell them that once you give a verbal warning, you expect the behavior to stop. If it does not, and you have to address the issue again, they will quietly, without disrupting instruction, be given a behavior warning card. Just put it on their desk and don't stop teaching! They must sign it, date it, and write the behavior they are being warned about on the back and return it to you. You keep the card for documentation, which is useful for parent conferences or in the event of an office referral. Includes a plain set without name and date if you wish to use repeatedly without documentation. Includes cards with place for name and date, blank cards with a line to write on that you can customize, Last Chance cards, Stop! cards, and Oops! cards...which you can use as you choose. Enjoy! - HappyEdugator

Punctuation - Punctuating Dialogue PowerPoint FREE! Improve writing by using quotation marks! Punctuation is important! Show students how to use quotation marks in dialogue correctly. 10 slides explain the correct way to punctuate dialogue. Explains split quotations, capitalization, commas, question marks, exclamation marks, and periods. Helpful for understanding where to place punctuation.

Summer Outdoor Fun Crossword Puzzle! Fun and free as a thank you to all my wonderful followers We all hate to see summer go, but hopefully it will last just a little bit longer. Enjoy this little piece of summer! - HappyEdugator

Punctuation - Punctuating Dialogue PowerPoint FREE! Improve writing by using quotation marks! Punctuation is important! Show students how to use quotation marks in dialogue correctly. 10 slides explain the correct way to punctuate dialogue. Explains split quotations, capitalization, commas, question marks, exclamation points, and periods. Helpful for understanding where to place punctuation. Good for reviewing for state tests. Supports Common Core! CCSS L 3.2c - using commas and quotation marks in dialogue. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.4.2b Use commas and quotation marks to mark direct speech and quotations from a text. A great activity to do with this PowerPoint is to have the kids write their own dialogues. I cut out of magazines some interesting pictures of all kinds of different people interacting. I glued them on cardstock, with the words Who? What? Where? When? and Why? written on each card, and laminated them. I passed the cards out, and students had to imagine what the people were saying to each other in the pictures, and then write the dialogue, using correct punctuation. They also had to later incorporate the dialogue into a short story that answered the five W questions/ The kids enjoyed this activity and got very creative with their stories! Enjoy! :) HappyEdugator

Thanksgiving Acrostic Poem - Thankful. For Thanksgiving, students can use this festive template to write an acrostic poem using the letters in the word thankful. Lower grades can write one word answers, upper level students can write phrases or sentences. Adjustable for your grade level. Enjoy! Thank you for looking. While you are here, please check out my store. Happy Thanksgiving!

Valentine Quiz...a free Valentine's Day Activity for choosing the right word. Multiple choice questions about Valentine's Day. Help children with word choice. Students have to choose the best choice of three words to fill in the blank. Grammar usage that is often tested on standardized tests. Great for building an understanding of how words are used correctly. Especially good for ELL, ESL and ESOL students, who may need extra help in identifying subtle differences in word choice and easily confused words. - HappyEdugator

Drama Extension Activities PowerPoint. Includes five extension menu choice boards for differentiating instruction for any drama unit. These were developed originally to be used with the plays "A Christmas Carol" and "The Diary of Anne Frank," but can be used with any play or dramatization. There are extension menus or enrichment activities for author, time period, play comprehension, drama terms and an independent study guide and a menu of reading project ideas for multiple intelligences-auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. Also included is an oral presentation rubric and a peer evaluation form. Useful for gifted students who need extra independent work. You will also have a color slide for each menu for projection on a white board and printer friendly student handout. Editable for your own classroom use. Enjoy. - HappyEdugator

Narrative Hooks and Writing Practice. Examples of various types of hooks from literature. Students will learn about hooks that writer's use to engage the reader and apply what they have learned by using a hook in their own writing. - HappyEdugator

Parts of Speech: The Eight Parts of Speech quiz. Three different parts. Part A - This is a short fill in the blank quiz on the eight parts of speech. Students have to write the part of speech that matches the definition. Part B - Students have to identify nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in sentences. Part C - Students have to identify pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections in sentences. Use one, or all three. Simple and easy to grade. - HappyEdugator

Character Project and Adjectives List. Students create a fiction character for a new story. They must use 10+ adjectives from the provided list to create traits and an interesting personality for their character, and write detailed sentences to describe. Students will also make a drawing to describe what their character looks like. Included is the project handout with directions, an adjective list, and a writing checklist. The adjective list and writing checklist are also useful for any creative writing activity. Great to help students develop a character which they later introduce in a narrative. Supports common core! - HappyEdugator

Chemistry Tic Tac Think. A Differentiated Writing Assignment Tic Tac Think Menu. In this activity, students choose a task from each horizontal row. Students have a choice but the first row is related to the history of chemistry, the second to the periodic table and the third to the elements. In some cases the teacher may want to specify certain tasks for individual students. You may challenge some students to complete all the squares for enrichment. Can be used in class or as a homework assignment. Includes a writing checklist. Revised June 2013 to fix a typo and to give more guidelines to the assignments. Enjoy!

Sentences; All About Sentences PowerPoint. Animated. Sentence types and sentence structure. Interactive. Describes kinds of sentences (such as declarative, interrogative, exclamatory, and imperative), subjects and predicates (simple and compound), fragments and run-ons, simple, compound, and complex sentences, and adverb and adjective clauses. Great test prep! Has everything students need to know about sentences and sentence structure and gives short practice exercises which can immediately be checked. Teaches common core standards. Students can also copy notes on each lesson, and a list of subordinating conjunctions, and more. Each of the thirteen sections with practice and feedback can be a separate minilesson! - HappyEdugator

The Gift of the Magi PowerPoint. Animated PowerPoint on The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, a classic Christmas story that is a good resource for the holidays. Focus on figurative language. Complete lesson with before, during, and after reading activities. Includes background information about the author, twelve critical vocabulary words, review of foreshadowing and suspense, and a link to read the story online. Students close read to find foreshadowing and suspense, and focus rereading on discovering figurative language. Includes definitions and examples of figurative language in the story, such as metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, and idiom. Discussion questions, explanations with examples of irony and allusion, and concludes with a short story writing activity with a 100 point rubric. Includes a quick interactive comprehension check. - HappyEdugator

Poetry - Writing Poetry is EASY Smartboard fun and interactive activities. EASY stands for Emotional Appeals; Alliteration and Sound Devices; Similes, Metaphors and Figurative Language; and You Make the Rules. Students will love playing with words on the Smartboard and writing their own poems! - HappyEdugator

Rebus Puzzles 2 - a fun critical thinking activity. Figure out the word puzzles. Great to do with partners, or use as a warm up. Print and go, Works especially well for gifted and talented students who enjoy challenges, but will work with other student populations as well. Also includes a blank rebus puzzle sheet for students to create their own. Enjoy! - Happyedugator