Tried and True Teaching Tools to Assist Your Instructional Efforts
Welcome to Daily Teaching Tools
about me
Greetings to you, my fellow teacher.
My name is Chad Manis, a language arts and journalism teacher with 33 years of classroom experience.
Let me begin by saying thank you.
Thank you for becoming a teacher, and thank you for taking the time to go online in search of resources that you can use in your classroom. That tells me that you are a dedicated teacher.
That also tells me that you care about your kids and that you are devoted to helping them prepare for their and our tomorrows.
Not everyone can be a teacher. It takes a special sort of person with a lot of patience, resilience, adaptability, fortitude, backbone, and an endless ability to multitask.
But, you ARE that kind of person.
I don't have to tell you that the challenges are enormous. If you're like the majority of us these days, you're probably feeling more than a little overwhelmed.
I know that feeling all too well.
Teachers are being asked to do more and more, with less and less.
Too often, the focus seems to be on preparing students for standardized testing, posting online grades and lesson plans, and displaying the "required" items on bulletin boards.
Shouldn't we be focusing on the kids?
It's really no wonder that we feel overwhelmed.
Mission Statement
The primary purpose of Daily Teaching Tools is to provide you with free resources, materials, and strategies to enhance your effectiveness with kids. There are some secondary purposes as well.
I've put together a brief, light-hearted animation, hosted by one of my former colleagues, that should put the mission statement for this website in sharper focus.
Many of the tools that you will find here are mine, but just as many I "stole" from the resourceful teachers I've had the pleasure of working with throughout the years.
Please feel free to steal, uh, I mean, borrow them from me too.
What you WON'T find here is exactly the sort of stuff that I don't like when I visit websites that focus on teachers and teaching resources.
That sort of stuff includes long lists of unexplored websites that were copied and pasted, recommendations for products or services that the authors never tried themselves, stuffy academic language, and above all else, insincerity.
You won't find any of that here.
Rationale
These economic times have been difficult for all of us. In my case, I was forced into early retirement at the age of 59 because of our district's budgetary constraints.
After all, since I was on the top rung of the salary schedule, the money they were spending on me, could be used to hire two new beginning teachers!
More bang for their buck--at my expense, and I think, at the expense of the kids.
I have nothing against beginning teachers whatsoever. After all, I was one myself, once upon a time. But, I also know that experience leads to better teaching and that kids benefit from that.
Which brings me to why I'm doing this--as corny as it might sound, I love teaching. In fact, I am actively pursuing ways to get back into teaching, a task, once again, made more challenging by the state of our economy.
In the meantime, while I'm waiting for an opportunity, why not do something that reconnects me with something I love?
In Return
I DO know that you are a teacher, but I have NO idea whether you have any experience developing websites.
I've been working on Daily Teaching Tools for 14 months now, every day of every week, 7 to 9 hours a day--sometimes more.
Am I complaining? Of course not.
This is my way of continuing to make a meaningful impact in the world of education. And, I am passionate about it.
All I ask in return is that you support my efforts by sharing an idea with your fellow teachers on the Teachers' Ideas page and/or adding a comment to one of my blog entries at The Teacher Beacon.
Take a few seconds to click on my Facebook Like button, or take a minute or two to add a brief comment about one of the Daily Teaching Tools pages that you may have found useful.
This is only the second time in the last 14 months that I've updated this homepage. Daily Teaching Tools has grown so much that I figured it was well past time to do so.
If you have suggestions, questions, or comments related to anything regarding this site, I'd love to hear from you. Please contact me and let me know what's on your mind.
In the meantime, I will continue adding teaching tools and plan to do so throughout the coming year and beyond. If you bookmark this site and visit regularly, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised and rewarded.
The quickest and easiest way to see what's new or what's been updated is togo to the Page Updates page, which appears near the top of the navigation bar at the left. Brief announcements pertaining to Daily Teaching Tools are also displayed there.
Let me close for now with this thought.
We didn't choose the wrong profession. America just chose the wrong heroes.
Topics featured in this teaching blog include, but are not limited to, budget problems, teachers' and students' issues, the achievement gap, managing misbehavior...
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Although About Me is mainly about me, it is also about my significant other, a host of avatars, and a serious love of teaching, programming and photography . . .
Ideas for first year teachers: Establishing connections with kids, showcasing relevance, managing the classroom, using classroom routines, communicating with parents, and . . .
Ideas for a great first day of school: Use the Wow! Factor, create immediate opportunity for success, establish the tone, provide motivation, describe expectations, and . . .
Classroom Management: Establishing classroom routines, providing warm up activities, structuring instructional time, the "Going to the Movies" approach, setting expectations, and . . .
Classroom routines: controlling traffic, preparing students for instruction, obtaining materials, managing the pencil sharpener, maximizing instructional time, more...
CHAMPs Classroom Management: How to develop strategies for multiple instructional approaches, tips on how to implement strategies, examples of CHAMPs strategies, and ...
Try out these classroom behavior management strategies on those little knuckleheads. Progressive discipline, using student planners, creating behavior contracts, more.
A comprehensive strategy for motivating students: Enhance classroom participation, teamwork, individual effort, and more. Free downloads are available.
Teaching methods: the deductive approach is a great way to deliver concepts quickly and efficiently. Start with the objective and use students' responses to structure the lesson.
These inductive teaching methods are guaranteed to increase student motivation and participation. Kids learn content while sharpening processing skills...
Of all the inductive teaching methods, this one, is clearly my favorite. Students learn content while establishing their confidence as learners. This REALLY works . . .
Cooperative Learning: Preparing for group work; How to assign individual tasks to group members, facilitator, recorder, summarizer, more; free PDFs download...
Cooperative Learning: Dealing with the dominant student, the slow student, the bright student becoming bored, the competitive student, the unfamiliar...
Cooperative Learning: This free PDF packet includes documents for self evaluation, peer evaluation, progress assessment, group checklist, two rubrics, and...
Persuasive and expository essay writing prompts, reader response questions and statements, and journal writing prompts for every day of the school year . . .
Essay Writing Prompts: over two and a half school years' worth of prompts for persuasive and expository compositions. Use them for practice or for the...
Journal Writing Prompts: These high-interest prompts will encourage kids to describe, explain, persuade, and narrate every day of an entire school quarter.
Journal Writing Prompts: These high-interest prompts will encourage kids to describe, explain, persuade, and narrate every day. Companion to Journal Jumpstarts Volume 1.
Teaching software: Talking avatars teach 30 language arts mini-lessons via digital projector or smart board while YOU relax, 20 writing tutorials, 60 multimedia warm ups . .
Talking avatars teach 30 language arts mini-lessons via digital projector or smart board while YOU relax. Author's purpose, how to summarize, main idea . . .
Free download of middle school English warm up activities for display via digital projector, smart board, or the classroom TV. 5 activities for each of 12 categor . . .
This free writing software is designed for individual workstations. 20 step by step tutorials are available for producing articles, reviews, essays . . .
This language arts mini-lesson focuses on The Importance of Reading. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts mini-lesson focuses on Introducing Literature. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts mini-lesson focuses on Determining the Author's Purpose. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts mini-lesson focuses on The Elements of Setting. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on Characterization. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on The Elements of Plot. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on How to Summarize. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
Save 50% on this bundle of language arts mini lessons, including Introducing Literature, The Elements of Plot, Characterization, Author's Purpose, How to Summarize...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on Context Clues. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on Cause and Effect. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on fact and opinion. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on comparison and contrast. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on Recognizing Supporting Details. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on Identifying the Main Idea. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson focuses on Making Inferences. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions, and...
Save 50% on this bundle of language arts mini lessons, including Using Context Clues, Identifying Cause and Effect, Distinguishing Fact and Opinion, Identifying the Main Idea...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson is the first of two parts on capitalization. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson is the second of two parts on capitalization. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson is the first of two parts on using commas. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson is the second of two parts on using commas. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson is all about using colons and semicolons. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson is all about using quotation marks. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson is all about Using Apostrophes. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions...
This language arts multimedia mini-lesson is all about Using Hyphens and Dashes. An animated, talking avatar presents instruction, gives examples, delivers questions...
Save 50% on this bundle of language arts mini lessons, including Capitalization 1 and 2, Using Commas 1 and 2, Using Semicolons and Colons, Using Quotation Marks...
These free online teacher resources offer a wide variety of useful tools: activities, incentives, reference resources, downloadables, lesson plans, and more . . .
Wow them by teaching with technology! Useful tips on using digital projectors, classroom computers, the internet, Elmo, and SMART Board. Free downloads.
Providing for successful classroom management: eliminating roll calling; establishing makeup work system; defining class rules; planning for quieting the class; sharing control...
These strategies and free resources specifically target teaching writing: engagement strategy, data-driven practices, lesson idea for creating narrative...
The Guest Author's Toolbox is an online place to share teaching strategies. Read and write about what really works in the classroom. Classroom management, teaching tips...
These free graphic organizers include character webs, cognitive bookmarks, story maps, reading analysis, instructional webs, customizable organizers . . .
These free graphic organizers include webs for preparing to write, flow charts for sequencing, persuasive and expository essay maps, customizable organizers . . .
These academic tips for efficient learning include good listening in class, how to take notes, using acronyms to remember information, and much more...
This author study includes everything--rationale, expectations, samples of artifacts, and detailed rubrics. Students learn and grow as they study authorship.
These free reading tests feature high-interest and/or informative passages followed by 5 or 6 multiple choice questions. Students finish in about 15 minutes allowing time for immediate feedback.
How to teach spelling: Four guidelines and five techniques for helping kids become better spellers. Free downloadable set of PDF documents/graphic organizers.
These tips for test taking include time management, the QAR strategy, underlining for comprehension, multiple-choice tactics: free downloadable PDF package.
This reading list features selective Newbery and Caldecott Medal winning books and top graphic novels. Plus, the "Goldilocks Test," free downloadable resources, more...
These best website design awards are a great way to receive recognition for a job well done. The teacher resources awards would be a win-win situation for all of us...
This showcase of best website design awards for educators features the Top 50 Classroom Websites and the Top 50 Teacher Resources Websites, as nominated by teachers.
These teacher bulletin board ideas are appropriate for any subject area. Let your boards, walls, and whiteboards enhance your classroom management. Free downloadables.
Two of these teacher time savers are completely free of charge. Additional titles include Essay Writing Kit, Just Multiply It!, End-of-the-Year Language Unit...
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