FREE: Our Most Popular Downloads

As more and more people sign up for our newsletter, we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to get all the free teaching materials we give out. Each week, I’ll add a few more to the list but here are five good ones to start with:

1. Conventional Wisdom. A creative and challenging puzzle-like approach to teaching punctuation and grammar. This lesson can be used over and over again with little or no preparation.

2. Punctuation Reading. A fascinating and unconventional way of teaching punctuation that can be used with any text and takes less than 5 minutes to teach without preparation.

3. Small Words. A valuable writing lesson on the power of simple language. The point here is to play up the contrast between prosaic everyday language and lofty academic prose. It doesn’t say that academic language is bad, merely that simple language is often clearer and more to the point.

4. Haiku Decks for Teaching. Many of you know that I’ve fallen in love with the nifty iPad slide deck creation app called Haiku Deck. In my earliest uses of the product, I created a variety of short decks that I have used in my teaching in different subjects and at different grade levels. I use them as well in my training to illustrate simple but effective lesson ideas. All are included here in PDF format so you don't need Haiku Deck to use them. But get the app anyway. It was great when I began using it two years ago and it's even better now.

5. The Learning Patterns Strategy Guide. This is the big one. But not because it’s big. In just over 50 pages, you’ll find 42 re-usable cross-curricular, cross-grade strategies you can use again and again to help your kids work more effectively and to lighten your teaching load.

We have a ton of new stuff we’ve created from the many professional development workshops we’ve done in the last year. But there’s so much of it, I haven’t put it up on the website. So I’ll keep bringing it out through the newsletter. Meanwhile, if you haven’t downloaded things from our website, we have about two thousand pages of curriculum materials, right on the front page in the far left column. Please help yourself.