Go to Books Linky Party!

Stephanie over at Teaching in Room 6 is running a really great linky party - "Go to Teaching Books" which is a great idea. I know that a lot of teachers have a variety of books in their bag of tricks, so to speak.

I have three books that I simply adore and are my "Go to" whenever I feel like something is just not working in my classroom. Honestly, this year I've had to pull out all three and start over from scratch. Switching schools in October is a difficult job.

Instruction for All Students - by Paula Rutherford

Instruction for All Students is a great book that has easy ideas that you can quickly implement into the classroom. The idea for having the students complete a daily learning log is in there, also a great list of products that you can have your students produce. It's also cross referenced with the standards, so you can always correlate your lessons to the National, State, Core (whatever it's moving to these days) Standards.

Teach Like A Champion - Doug Lemov

What I adore about Teach Like a Champion is that you don't have to do an entire overhaul to your classroom, lessons, etc. It has 49 strategies that you can implement to make your classroom run smoother. It's as simple as saying that you're going to focus on the strategy of "No Opt Out" for that day with your students. It's a great read and I highly recommend picking it up.

Tools for Teachers - Fred Jones

Finally, the classroom management guru other than Harry Wong (who I love too... but he's been widely represented in this linky party!) that I stick to. What I like about Dr. Jones is that he's a stickler for the classroom set up portion of the classroom management idea. How you arrange your desks determines classroom successes. (I was ready to pull out his book if people were going to give me a difficult time getting rid of my classroom single desks.) Also, his ideas revolving around PAT (preferred activity time) are genius and something that I'm going to have to do with my very unruly classes this year.