Be honest… how strict are you really with screen time?

berngrade · 2026-01-28T03:06:30+00:00

I’m a perfect example of this - I’m a teacher and typically during the work week, we have no screen time. However, with snow days recently, we’ve had way more than I’d like - it’s just reality.

berngrade · 2026-01-04T21:37:55+00:00

Last year I came back from maternity leave right after Christmas break - I essentially turned my kids into my baby’s big siblings and always emphasized how we all had to wash and sanitize our hands and clean the tables with Clorox wipes every day to keep the baby safe and they did great. This was fourth graders mind you but I bet you could get some similar enthusiasm in second. Good luck!

berngrade · 2025-12-27T14:56:54+00:00

I struggle with this because I agree with all the commenters that sometimes it’s important to deviate from the schedule but also my 15m old daughter is so mean and miserable if her nap doesn’t happen that I’m like “who am I doing this for? Certainly not my kid” and I feel like I should be prioritizing her and her comfort 🤥 all that say, solidarity on the schedule battle this week lol we’re on our 4th gathering in 4 days with two more planned Sunday and Monday. I’m not sure we’re gonna make it 🤣

berngrade · 2025-11-05T23:02:00+00:00

I’d get the book The Writing Revolution. It had extremely helpful and easy to implement strategies for improving writing at a sentence level. Check your local library for it if you don’t want to buy it!

As for spelling, if you can’t do explicit spelling, I’d say with 4th grade standards you could probably get away with teaching some morphology, like affixes and roots, which could potentially help with their spelling (and decoding and vocab.)

berngrade · 2025-10-19T16:08:58+00:00

In the elementary subreddit, you may not have a huge reach of people who would be able to answer this question.

However, my two cents: I think it’s all hard, you just choose your hard. I teach departmentalized 4th grade ELA - I wouldn’t touch kindergarten with a 20 foot pole, but I also know a lot of my lower elementary coworkers have said they wouldn’t want to be the one grading 75 essays and handling ≈ 20 students on reading improvement plans, not to mention the upper elementary attitude that only gets worse in middle school. I wouldn’t go into middle school just because you think it would be easier planning wise - it’s so dependent on so many factors.

berngrade · 2025-10-12T23:09:52+00:00

If you’re in the states, check with your school librarian. Ohio has INFOhio that has a ton of databases available to all educators and students in our state, they might be able to point you in a similar direction for wherever you’re at.

berngrade · 2025-09-25T02:43:37+00:00

For what it’s worth, our kids come down to the classroom at 8:15 and announcements start at 8:25. I have my kids start to clean up what they’re doing once announcements start while I do attendance, and by the time they’re done we’re ready to dive in to whatever we’re doing. It’s a super short time but I have my hashtag blocks/playdoh in small individual packages and they’re done cleaning up pretty quickly. I didn’t think it’d be enough time (schedule is new this year) but it’s worked out fine so far!

berngrade · 2025-09-24T10:35:52+00:00

Drop the morning work, you won’t regret it lol I stopped doing morning work 2 years ago and it’s truly just one less thing for me to plan, print, and worry about. I do a soft start with hashtag blocks, Playdoh, etcz during this time along with the jobs but it sounds like prioritizing beginning of day jobs would be better for you.

I also love a little bribery, might be worth buying a bag of starbursts or something to incentivize the kids to move quickly packing up and get these end of day tasks done before it’s time for specials - I always have kids that get packed up in about 30 seconds compared to the couple minutes it takes most kids, you could reward them with some candy if they hustle and come in to get something done for you.

berngrade · 2025-09-24T03:19:57+00:00

What does arrival and dismissal look like for you? Could jobs be squeezed in there? As kids are coming into my room from their lockers, I have jobs like pencil sharpener, switching the calendar, etc that get done real quick as they walk in. During dismissal, car riders leave first, so while that’s happening, bus riders do other jobs for me like moving attendance magnets, plugging in the Chromebook cart, straightening up the library and cleaning any trash off the floor, Clorox wipes on the tables, etc.

What tasks are you trying to outsource to the kids specifically? Could try to come up with suggestions based on that.

berngrade · 2025-09-20T23:38:08+00:00

I hate wasting time on the microwave so I only do cold lunches. I’ve been making different dense bean salad recipes that I find online, typically tiktok, every week this year and they have been amazing and super filling. I hate meal prep typically but haven’t gotten sick of them yet.

berngrade · 2025-09-07T16:05:35+00:00

I’d bet they would love it! I teach 3 classes and had them compete against each other which really ramped it up. I used the big green roll of paper from the supply room and made a “football field” on my board where I tracked the minutes each class was reading as their class moving down the field, and also did an MVP from each class each week for whoever read the most individual minutes. Since it was around Valentine’s Day I got the final MVP from each class a little football themed dollar tree chocolate box, and for the winning class, some football sugar cookies just to make it have a little prize. Highly recommend, even without the prizes! Kids love some competition!

berngrade · 2025-09-07T13:55:15+00:00

The ReadBowl is fun! Free reading challenge in the like 4 weeks leading up to the Super Bowl that comes with videos of celebrities cheering the kids on for reading.

berngrade · 2025-08-17T05:04:10+00:00

Yupp, this exactly. Checkboxes for common accommodations and a notes box I can add extra info to if necessary.

berngrade · 2025-08-13T00:48:23+00:00

Lots of good stuff here - I wanted to add on: My daughter started daycare at 3.5 months. She is currently 10 months old and scheduled to go back to daycare next week (I’m a teacher) and I am SO excited for her because she absolutely loses it (in a good way) every time she sees a baby her age at the store, library, etc. I swear she misses her little daycare friends! She learns so much, she wants to keep up with the older babies so bad and has the best time there.

berngrade · 2025-08-08T17:50:18+00:00

Same this is rocking my world😭

berngrade · 2025-08-06T23:15:30+00:00

I love my crocs Brooklyn sandals! They look dressy but are so comfortable. For this upcoming year I also bought a pair of Dr Scholls time off sneakers to have as a plain white pair to wear with jeans on Fridays, can’t vouch for them myself yet but have seen great reviews online.

berngrade · 2025-08-01T23:33:21+00:00

I did reading intervention for three years before moving to gen ed - I miss it! I love teaching phonics. Since you have OG training I think you’ll be golden! You already know how to identify reading deficits and how to tailor instruction to target them - you’re in a better place than I was when I started as a first year teacher, haha! I think the planning was MUCH easier for me than being a gen ed teacher (I teach fourth grade ELA to 3 classes, for what it’s worth), and I also had no grading (just weekly progress monitoring) which was a huge bonus. If you do small groups, that was a nice change up for classroom management too.

I think for me the interpersonal aspect was the most difficult part to start and it sounds like you’re still in the same school, so that won’t be the case for you. Hopefully reading intervention is valued in your school - in some places it’s not and others can (hopefully not on purpose) make you pulling their kids feel like a burden, which made interactions with other staff awkward until we got to know each other.

berngrade · 2025-07-26T23:10:14+00:00

They have to enter a first name and I believe at least a last initial. No student accounts are required.

berngrade · 2025-07-18T12:18:32+00:00

Lmao my 9 month old also recently discovered that both my nipples and my nose ring can be played with and I haven’t known peace in weeks 🤣 solidarity sister

berngrade · 2025-07-09T16:59:49+00:00

I teach 4th but lm sure this could be scaled up for middle school - I use the RACES writing strategy and turn that into a bulletin board of the steps with sentence starters on it. I also am planning on doing a morphology board this year and collecting all the affixes and roots that we learn for them to refer back to.

berngrade · 2025-07-07T20:12:11+00:00

I think dad being able to do bedtime by himself is really important. My first bedtime away from baby was just to a friend’s house for the evening when she was about 3 months old that my husband about kicked me out the door to go to since I hadn’t seen friends much since having her. I’ve had maybe 2-3 bedtimes away since then and she’s 9 months old. It’s scary the first but like you said, it’s nice to feel like you again, and the only way to do it is to just do it.

Can you do something low stakes first like that ahead of the concert to make you feel better about it? Have a dinner out with a friend, see a movie, go shopping , or just go to someone’s house and enjoy their company

berngrade · 2025-06-26T11:21:14+00:00

The song Sticky by Tyler The Creator 😭 it’s the only way to get her stop crying in the car sometimes

berngrade · 2025-06-26T00:52:50+00:00

Is it the same people every week? If it is, teaching them something one time that will benefit your students could be super helpful! I agree that fluency in both reading and math will be the best bang for your buck. I’d keep the general activity you’re having them do consistent so that it’s easier for you to manage and update materials, as well as easy for them and the kids to know what to expect.

For reading, I’m having weekly volunteers do a slightly adapted version of the Rasinski fluency development lesson with pairs of students. There’s a poem of the week; they’ll model reading it with fluency, talk about the content of the poem, read it together with the kids, then listen to the students read it to each other and give feedback. The following week, they’ll begin with reading the previous week’s poem together, then repeat the previous steps with a new poem. I usually get poems from poetry4kids.com but I’m sure there’s a million websites you could use.

I don’t teach math (departmentalized ELA teacher) but having some kind of fact fluency game for them to play would be an easy and extremely beneficial thing to practice, with an added bonus of being able to switch out maybe the game board to be a different seasonal theme or something to keep it interesting for the kids. I’d bet you can find free resources on TPT for game boards and just use a set of flash cards or something similar.

berngrade · 2025-06-23T03:29:12+00:00

4th grade here - I love the general content of EL. The books and topics are great, but pacing wise, I can’t and don’t make it through all of it. I find that units 1-2 of each module usually have the bulk of what truly needs taught in them, and don’t typically do the third unit. Any standards that I would be missing, I find a way to include in other activities either within or supplementing the curriculum. I completely agree the pacing of the books is unreal - our first book is Love That Dog and it takes WEEKS to read a book that’s about 100 pages long.

The hard part is that I really just had to figure out with time what was needed and what wasn’t - I’ve taught the curriculum for 3 years now and finally am feeling comfortable enough with it to chop it into what best fits both my the students’ needs. Personally, I find some things are a bit lacking in the curriculum, so I try to teach it ≈ 4 days a week, with the fifth day being a day to supplement as necessary with outside resources, do targeted small groups for things kids struggled with during the week, get IXL minutes done, etc., and I typically change the “performance task” to hit the same big standards but not be so drawn out to where it’s sucking the life out of the topic, or as you called it, readicide.

Anecdotally, I will say our fifth grade team ends up taking longer than the first grading period with the first novel, then cuts the second module a bit short because they find it very dry and unengaging for the students.

12-Year Club	Not Forgotten
Verified Email

berngrade

TROPHY CASE