Travel Brochure Rap Project. This group project will have your students learning and creating! They will need to use map skills, research skills, writing skills, spelling and grammar. This activity has students working in small groups of three or four, pretending to be travel agents to help The Rhymers, an unusual family who only understand rhymes and rap everything they say. Works well with a poetry unit as well. Print out this handout with the assignment, rubric, and self assessment, and watch them create! Teachers and students can change the countries to whatever fits...we used Spain, Denmark, and France. - HappyEdugator

Beginning of the Year Student Survey and Poster. Beginning of the Year or First Day of School print and go handout. Includes an 8 question student survey about classroom expectations from a student perspective, and a poster you can hang about new beginnings. This that will help you get to know your students and help them focus on what is important. Share results of the survey with your students and discuss how they fit in to classroom rules and procedures. - HappyEdugator

Exit Slip Ticket Out - Pac Man Summarizing Activity Ticket Out. Ticket out the door? Use this summarizing activity to have students take notes on what was important to have learned in your lesson. Students summarize by filling in the thought bubbles and take additional notes at the bottom. Can be given out at the beginning of the week and students fill in the bubbles daily Monday through Thursday and review for assessment on Friday. Also great for summarizing independent reading or chapters of novels. - HappyEdugator

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins Vocabulary List and Activities. Complete Vocabulary List and Activity sheets for the Hunger Games book Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. The first page is a word list with definitions of 47 important words to know from the novel. There are four pages of vocabulary activities: two different fill-ins, a crossword puzzle, and a synonym match. Key included. - HappyEdugator

Middle Grades Writing Test Preparation PowerPoint. A detailed TEST PREP PowerPoint presentation designed to help students prepare for what is required on the Middle Grades Writing Assessment in Georgia, which can be applied to any standardized writing test anywhere. This presentation can be used to teach students to produce quality expository and persuasive essays and the expectations of any writing assessment. 43 slides, the last seven slides are for the teacher, including scoring, activities to promote good writing, and best practices. -HappyEdugator

Literature Terms - Strategies Authors Use to Engage the Reader PowerPoint. Literary terms and elements of fiction literature that can be used as an introduction or review of literary devices and commonly used literature terms on state tests. Slides are in alphabetical order with colorful pictures to keep your students engaged. Terms included: allegory, alliteration, allusion, analogy, characterization, conflict, diction, foreshadowing, figurative language, hyperbole, imagery, irony, metaphor, metonymy, motif, mood, onomatopoeia, oxymoron, paradox, pastiche, personification, point of view, satire, setting, simile, stream of consciousness, symbolism, theme, tone, vernacular. 34 slides. - HappyEdugator

Short u Sound - Sounding Out Words PowerPoint. CVC words. Teach reading with phonics and decoding using word families! Short u Word Family. Slides introduce the sound of short u and have students practice blending short u sound with consonants to form one syllable CVC words. Students read the slides and get rewarded with fun shouts and cheers. This is the next step to reading after students learn consonant sounds and the sound of short a and short e and o. This animated PowerPoint has 17 slides of practice, with a slide of nonsense words and a slide of real words at the end of the presentation for teacher assessment. Supports common core standards. Good supplement for CVC word work! - HappyEdugator

TEST PREP: Reading - English Language Arts. Key terms and academic vocabulary. Standardized test terminology. Two lists of vocabulary and terminology often seen on standardized tests. One for Grade 1 - 3, and one for Grade 4 - 8. These words may be found on state tests or common core assessments. Make sure your students are familiar with the terminology before testing begins. - HappyEdugator

Suffixes for Parts of Speech PowerPoint Presentation. This PowerPoint has common suffixes that are used for nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and their meanings. Students who learn these suffixes will find determining parts of speech easier, and will also be able to use this knowledge to build vocabulary. A foldable graphic organizer (instructions included) will help students retain the information. After students take notes, they can quiz on the practice questions. Then they can learn four spelling rules for suffixes. - HappyEdugator

Myths, Legends, Fables, and Folktales - Oral Tradition - Four Forms of Traditional Tales Handout. This handout will help your students understand myths, legends, fables and folktales by clearly defining them in a colorful graphic organizer, and then giving examples of each. A useful introduction to a unit on folktales, fairytales, or oral tradition stories. You may wish to project on a screen and have students take notes. Includes a note-taking page and a short quiz with key. Revised July 2014 - HappyEdugator

Halloween PowerPoint! A fun Halloween Mad-Lib activity! Use this Halloween Mad Lib to practice parts of speech...project it on your whiteboard. Students can number one through twelve on their own paper and come up with names, nouns, and other parts of speech as per the directions, and then volunteers read the following slide with their substitutions to make silly Halloween stories. Lots of fun, and students get to use their knowledge of parts of speech as well! Happy Halloween!- HappyEdugator

Earth Day Cooperative Learning Activity - Committee to Reduce Environmental Pollution. Works well as a post reading activity for The Lorax by Dr. Seuss or The Wump World by Bill Peet. Students will meet in groups (or committees) to analyze several different scenarios and to determine which type of polluter is the most destructive to the environment. Students will compare their individual results with their group results, and then the groups will compare their results with other groups in the class. The final activity is to see if the class can come to a consensus. Extension activity - discuss possible solutions.

Poetry Anthology Anchor Activity and Rubric. Students create a poetry anthology or poetry portfolio. Handout is the complete assignment for a poetry anthology for a poetry unit, including rubric. Give this handout and rubric to your students if you wish them to work on a poetry anthology project, which can also be used as an anchor activity to work on when other work is complete. - HappyEdugator

Rikki Tikki Tavi Vocabulary Activities. Vocabulary for the short story Rikki Tikki Tavi by Rudyard Kipling. Includes: Study Sheet with 15 vocabulary words, their part of speech and definition; Two page Vocabulary Practice Sheet, Study Cards, Fiction Literature Terms Sheet, Hot Seat Vocabulary Review Game, Vocabulary Matching Test, and Key. - HappyEdugator

TEST PREP - Language Arts Test Practice Interactive PowerPoint. Test Prep for standardized testing. 30 interactive multiple choice practice test questions for test prep: Verb tenses, agreement, comparative and superlative adjectives and pronouns. PowerPoint with animated graphics has sentence completion questions of the type that are common on state standardized tests. 52 slides -

Poetry Concept Map. When introducing a poetry unit, this concept map graphic organizer will help your students understand the relationship of graphics, sound devices, and figurative language to poetry as a whole. Each of these are further broken down to show terms related to them. For example, sound devices are alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia. I have used this as a transparency, projected on an LCD, or blown it up and made it into a poster to hang in the classroom. - HappyEdugator

Adjective Clauses Graphic Organizer. A four quadrant graphic organizer for students to use for notes on adjective clauses. Project the completed one while students can fill in the blanks on their copy, or have them fold a piece of notebook paper into four quadrants and have them copy notes (for more advanced students). First box is the definition, the second box explains how to identify, the third box gives examples, and the last box explains their function. Useful reference tool for students to use when they are working with adjective clauses. Supports common core. L.7.1a L.7.1c - HappyEdugator

Clauses - Identifying Clauses Worksheet or Quiz. After reading passage, students will write the letter of the term that correctly identifies the underlined group of words in each sentence. Students will have to be able to differentiate between adjective clauses and adverb clauses, independent clauses, simple sentences, compound sentences and complex sentences. Ten multiple choice questions. This can be used as a practice sheet or as a quiz. Key included. - HappyEdugator

TEST PREP: Key Terms - Reading & English Language Arts. Standardized test terminology. Two lists of vocabulary and terminology often seen on standardized tests. One for Grade 1 - 3, and one for Grade 4 - 8. These words may be found on state tests or common core assessments. Make sure your students are familiar with the terminology before testing begins. - HappyEdugatorYou may also like:

The River by Gary Paulsen PowerPoint Presentation. Give students the background knowledge they need to understand The River by Gary Paulsen. Many of my students from the South are not familiar with northern rivers and the hazards of the river environment. This presentation introduces students to the dangers that might face someone trying to survive on a raft on a northern river. This activate prior knowledge of students who have been on rivers, which will lead to some engaging class discussion and create interest to introduce the novel. - HappyEdugator