The other day, we were reviewing shapes.  For some reason, most of the shape names aren’t too tricky.  Circle – well we all know that.  Square and Triangle too. Rectangle can be challenging, but a little explanation of the two short and two long sides usually does the trick. It’s the darn Rhombus that gets us every [...]

Another one of those life skills that is difficult to grasp is money. This is a topic that we go over continually all year round. One of my students favorite songs is Honey Bunny by Teacher Tipster. If you have never heard of Teacher Tipster I highly recommend you check him out. He is hilarious, has fantastic ideas, and just fun.   ...

Well, it really doesn’t get much better than the 100th day in kindergarten. It’s kind of like Christmas, Valentine’s Day (coming Thursday!), and the Fourth of July wrapped into one.  Well, it is in my class anyway.   I used an entire bottle of glitter to make this for the doorway: We sang our hearts [...]

This week, I was fortunate enough to have a visit from the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Coordinator for my district.  She is leading a book group I’m partaking in on the book Number Talks and volunteered to come in and demonstrate with my class. It’s always eye opening for me to sit with [...]

EdCanvas - http://www.edcanvas.com -  Create an interactive online lesson with this brilliant site. Upload and curate all the resources for a lesson in one place and access them with one click. The site works with Office files, PDFs, flash files, small videos, images and internet links and even connects to Google Drive and Dropbox. Then simply ...

Incorporating math in various subject areas are a great way to improve student achievement and career intrests.  Everyone loves music, but everyone has their favorite type of music.  A great website that integration resources, multimedia activities, and homeade instrument projects the students can make is ...

Wow, I really feel like I am neglecting my blog and my readers since school started. It has just been so crazy around here. Anyway... this week with my 2nd grade math class I worked on skip counting. I also find this a hard area to teach... not sure why. We used a hundreds chart so we could see the patterns when counting by 2's, 5's and 10's. ...

As a younger students have recess and middle school students might have P.E. for 30-45 minutes in a day, math class is an easy way to incorporate moving around and abilities you might not get to see in other classrooms.  There are many different ways to incorporate movement and higher-order thinking at the same time, not only does it help the ...

I have heard that students in recovery math can't take music or band.  Why make them choose?  Incorporate music in math, it is easy and makes math fun for the students who couldn't or wanted to be in music.  I have heard that math recovery teachers teach from a ''script,'' when did we start taking the art out of teaching.  ...

There are lots of quick things teachers can do to activate the brain while teaching math.  Remember, the brain needs movement and active engagement in order to activate those dendrites.  Keeping things fun along with social interactions are putting the brain in the best place for learning to happen.  Here are some tricks I use. Skip Count beanie ...