Stellar Teacher Podcast with Sara Marye

When a new school year begins, it's natural to start thinking about teacher goals. Maybe you want to improve your literacy instruction, build stronger relationships with students, stay more organized, communicate more consistently with families, or finally create a healthier work life balance. But before you make a long list of everything you want to improve this year, we want you to consider a different question: What kind of teacher do you want to be this year?

Reading intervention for upper elementary can feel overwhelming, especially when you're trying to figure out exactly what your struggling readers need while also managing an already packed literacy block. You know your students need additional support. But what should you teach? Where should you start? How do you fit intervention into your schedule? And how do you provide foundational reading instruction without making your third, fourth, or fifth graders feel like they're doing "little kid" work? In this replay episode of The Stellar Teacher Podcast, we're giving you a behind the scenes look at the Stellar Teacher Reading Intervention Kit, a resource created specifically to help upper elementary teachers provide targeted, effective reading intervention to students who struggle with decoding.

Back to school stress can start creeping in long before students walk through the classroom door. Between the excitement of a fresh start, the anticipation of a new group of students, and the pressure to get everything ready, it's completely normal to feel a little overwhelmed—whether it's your first year teaching or your fifteenth. There are classrooms to prepare, lesson plans to create, meetings to attend, procedures to plan, and a seemingly endless to do list. Add in the pressure to have everything ready before students walk through the door, and it's easy to feel overwhelmed before the school year even begins.

The first day of school can come with a lot of pressure. There are lesson plans to finalize, supplies to organize, names to learn, procedures to teach, activities to prep, and about a hundred little details running through your mind. And somewhere along the way, it can start to feel like your first day needs to be perfect. You need the perfect welcome activity. The perfect classroom setup. The perfect schedule. The perfect lesson plans. And, of course, you need to fit everything you planned into the school day. But here's the good news: A successful first day of school doesn't require perfection.