Teacher’s Bag of Tricks

What do you do with a socially immature student who struggles to stay on task, and therefore struggles to grasp academic concepts?

• recommend one of the school counselor’s small groups for self-esteem or peer relationships
• after-school Math tutoring
• design a behavior plan that targets three specific goals and a checklist to track daily (or hourly) successes
• set up read-aloud sessions where the student can read books to a younger buddy student.
• schedule one-on-one time with an instructional assistant to work on multiplication facts and spelling
• use a timer and give the student micro-assignments (”complete this problem in 2 minutes and then come and show me”)

Now that the cursory iTunes introduction is out of the way, I can tell you about some great, free content available for download. The University of Southern Florida offers hundreds of children’s stories and classic literature in the form of audiobooks through the Lit2Go service. From Beatrix Potter to Charles Dickens and more, you can find audio files and printable versions for use in independent reading, small group or whole group instruction.

You can find the files in FSU’s iTunes U section in the iTunes store.

Tags are a great way to “file” a blog post. A post can have a virtually unlimited tags that allow anyone to reference its information. Teacher’s Bag tags are designed to make posts searchable by topic or grade level, or any other category you might think of.