So I thought over spring break I would catch up on all of my blogging, find cool new activities to do with my math students, and create some new ISN pages.  Well needless to say that never happened... We covered Quadrilaterals in Geometry class, however we only went with regular quadrilaterals for the time being. My students love charts, and ...

I love my students and wouldn't change them for the world, but so often they have a hard time with math that has multiple steps. We were working on function and they needed practice, but not just sit at their desks and work on a worksheet practice.  So I decided to make these huge posters, one poster for each of the three steps for graphing a ...

The Whole Concept MapI have a secret love for concept mapping.  Not only do I enjoy making them but I truly enjoy watching a class of students all create different concept maps on the exact same topic.  It's so interesting to see how each individual interprets a broad topic in such different ways.  The best part about it is that since it is how a ...

When I first started blogging I wrote a post about the importance of explicit vocabulary instruction. At the time I had very few followers and viewers so I thought it was a topic worth revisiting in hopes of reaching more teachers. Having worked in a Title I school for many years as an ESL Resource teacher I did a lot of research into vocabulary ...

One of my favorite things to have the students do to help them memorize information is to create a sorting activity. I will have them do the sorting activity a few times through out the unit to help them remember the information. I start off by creating a document with a table.  In this case I created an activity to help my students learn the ...

I love strategies that allow the students to activity work, get immediate feedback, and give me the opportunity to help my more struggling learners.  One of the greatest strategies is the ''Round Robin''. To create a round robin... I cut in half bright colored sheets of paper, in the example below there were 21 of them all together.  On the ...

One day teacher of English A said to teacher of English B, “The teacher has to teach contents, like history, so as to give an example. The teacher has to present specific points to his or her students. The teacher is like a (or should be), like a source of contents – and source of activitites. What I wanted to tell you today is that also, and ...

 Building Readers One of the most important activities you can do with your students is to teach them to become proficient readers. Reading for pleasure is wonderful, but without guidance from the teacher in learning how to use reading strategies effectively, your students will not show significant gains in reading. We have worked hard this ...

When you first interviewed for your job you get question like ''Do you think all students can learn?'', ''What's your favorite thing about teaching?'', and ''How do you make students feel comfortable in your classroom?''  I believe some teachers lose sight of these questions and how they answered these questions from when they joined the ...

I wanted to share my new blog with all of you! Add it to your reader or follow it on google.  http://samcooltoolsfortheclassroom.blogspot.com/ Its all about cool and techy tools to use in the classroom.