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No need to panic! Just click, print, and relax! EZSubPlans is a new resource for elementary teachers designed to make your next emergency absence or sub day trouble-free.  Each “Day” is packed with seven hours of age-appropriate, standards-based activities, and because every activity is kid-tested, you can count on EZSubPlans to be engaging and enjoyable.  Visit EZSubPlans.com to find out more, or just keep reading!

EZSubPlans has been developed by professional substitute Cathy S. Lewis and Scholastic author and National Board Certified teacher, Mack Lewis.  Each set of plans includes reading, writing, and math activities, as well as grammar, art, history, and even science.  All the teacher has to do is print . . . the sub does everything else!

Whether a classroom teacher, substitute, or administrator, EZSubPlans will provide you with inexpensive, kid-tested plans at the touch of a button. EZSubPlans includes seven hours of grade-specific lessons designed to make your next absence easy and worry-free.  Whether a classroom teacher wanting to avoid the frustrating and time-consuming process of preparing for an absence, or a substitute teacher needing back-up material, EZSubPlans gives you everything you need.  Teacher needs only to download, print, and photocopy. The sub does everything else.

Each EZSubPlans package includes detailed sub-notes, reproducible lessons in math, reading, grammar, art, and much more. Because we’re teachers, every lesson is tested in real classrooms, and every lesson is geared to meet the standards.  Classroom teachers can download and quickly prep a day or multiple days well in advance of an emergency or on the morning of. It’s as simple as that!

Visit EZSubPlans.com to make your next sub day easy and worry-free!  No more spending hours preparing material of questionable value. No more writing laborious notes explaining every lesson. With EZSubPlans, it’s all done for you –and it’s just $5. Just five bucks! Each package comes with a Quick Start Guide as well as detailed notes the sub can quickly plug into your “Teacher’s Standard Day Chart.” Answer keys are provided for each lesson, too, so when you return everything will be corrected and graded.  For just $5 your next sub-day can be easy and worry-free! Visit EZSubPlans.com to get started.

Interested in implementing the Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraph writing program?  Don’t wait until the beginning of the next school year; get a copy of the book now and begin experimenting with it as this school year winds down. After just a month of daily sentence practice and weekly paragraph writing, you’ll be convinced that Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraphs is just what you’re writing program needed.  It’s straight-forward and easy-to-use (there’s no teacher-edition, so you won’t have to spend hours wading through complicated instructions).  It’s kid-tested in real classrooms by real teachers (meaning kids actually enjoy and respond well to the lessons).  And best of all, it works.  The feedback has been fantastic.  Kids are allowed creative freedom while getting the structural instruction and practice they need. See for yourself.  Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraphs is available for less than ten bucks at fine booksellers everywhere including Overstock.com, Amazon, and Borders.

Whether a newbie, a student-teacher, or someone just considering the profession, our Quick Start Guide to Teaching will provide you with a dozen essential tips to sending your teaching career in the right direction–from relating to peers to stashing away cash for that teacher-exchange. It’s entirely FREE in our Bookstore, or just click on the tab marked “New Teachers” above.

Black History Month may be over, but there are still plenty of quality reader’s theater scripts to make the final third of your school year engaging.  Not only is former astronaut Buzz Aldrin appearing on the television show Dancing with the Stars, he’s also a character in our play, Fly Me to the Moon. His Stars performance will no doubt pique student interest in the Apollo missions, so be sure to have our play handy. It’s also baseball season, which gives you a natural lead-in to the Jackie Robinson story. Our play, How Jackie Changed the World, received rave reviews when it originally appeared in Scholastic’s Storyworks magazine. Let it liven up your classroom during Spring Training. Penelope Ann Poe’s Amazing Cell Phone, a modernized version of the classic short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, is on the TpT’s All-time best seller list, and you can pick up a class set for just two bucks!  Check out these and many other great classroom plays in our Bookstore today.

Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraphs appears in the Book Recommendations section of the February issue of Today’s OEA magazine. Super Sentences offers teachers 38 weeks of easy-to-use writing curriculum.   “The great thing about Super Sentences and Perfect Paragraphs,” says one teacher who piloted the program, “is that it emphasizes writing structure while still allowing students creative freedom.”  “It’s fun and easy-to-use,” says another.  “Our Super Sentence session is the best 15 minutes of our day.”  If you’re already using Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraphs, be sure to visit the tab (at top) for updates and tips on how to make the most of the material.  If you’re not yet a Super Sentence Guru, visit our Bookstore for more information, or click here to go directly to Amazon.

Penelope Ann Poe’s Amazing Cell Phone recently cracked the TpT All-Time 100 Best Seller List. The Poe play is a modernized, kid- friendly version of the Poe classic, The Tell-Tale Heart. It’s proven itself popular with students from 4th to 10th grade.  Another of Mack’s plays, We Shall Overcome, also made one of TpT’s lists. Teachers preparing for Black History Month helped land it in the Top 20 Best Sellers for January. It depicts events surrounding Martin Luther King’s Birmingham Children’s Crusade. For a more detailed look at these and seven other original plays for the classroom, visit our Bookstore.

Celebrate Black History Month in you classroom with any of numerous play scripts available from the Bookstore at mackowiecki.com. Imagine the emotions surrounding the end of the Civil War. For slaves, the end was especially poignant. Based on actual slave narratives, Freedom for the First Time tells about “The Day of Jubilee” from the perspective of a young slave girl. Box Brown’s Freedom Crate, meanwhile, tells the true story of Henry Brown, the slave who mailed himself to freedom in a box. Your Civil Rights instruction will come alive with We Shall Overcome, the story of Martin Luther King’s Birmingham Children’s Crusade. You can also hook those young athletes in your class with How Jackie Changed the World. This is a fun play to enact, but it depicts one of the most underrated events in the Civil Rights struggle: Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color-barrier in Major League Baseball. Finally, you can also pick up a FREE copy of “I Have a Dream,” Mack’s play based on real events from Martin Luther King’s childhood. It’s the ideal centerpiece of any classroom’s Black History Month Celebration. Enjoy!

The February/March issue of Storyworks features another of Mack’s original plays. This one takes students back to one of the most momentous days in American history: the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. This fresh and accessible play is the PERFECT way to celebrate African-American History Month and to pull your students into a discussion about Dr. King and his legacy. Get the play by becoming a Storyworks subscriber here. Supplement it by watching the YouTube video of Dr. King’s speech here. And thanks to the dedicated staff at Storyworks, you can also view an original program from The March on Washington here.

Celebrate Martin Luther King Day with a free download from Instructor Magazine!  Mack’s original play, “I Have a Dream,” depicts an event in King’s childhood that helped inspire him to become the Civil Rights leader we honor each January. The play originally appeared in the January 2000 of Storyworks, and was re-printed in a “printable booklet” form in the Jan/Feb 2003 issue of Instructor. It’s currently available on the Instructor website completely free by clicking here. Consider presenting a trio of  Civil Rights plays during Black History Month in February.  Check out We Shall Overcome, Box Brown’s Freedom Crate, Freedom for the First Time, and How Jackie Changed the World in our Bookstore.  Each play is fully reproducible. For just $2, you’re buying a full-class set!