A collaborative blog where two friends share great ideas, activities, and resources about teaching, coaching, and tutoring in the primary grades!
Backstory #1: I've mentioned before that this is my first year teaching two levels of Algebra 2. The regular (i.e., not advanced) class has challenged me like no other. When things go well, I must document so I can try to make that happen again. Backstory #2: In our PLC recently, we resolved to look for ways to increase peer tutoring in our classes. This is something that has been important to me for a long time, but lately I've been looking for ways to be more intentional about it. We are at the end of a unit in Algebra 2 and for the past two days, my lesson activities have looked like this: Step 1: Finish yesterday's assignment (rational equations, most had 2-3 problems left). Step 2: Work on a set of 16 review problems. Get a green star from me on each and every problem. (One of my strategies has been to check every problem. It helps me to locate errors and misconceptions, and students seem to be more confident and make more forward progress when they have immediate feedback.) Step 3: If you have any incomplete assignments from this unit, work on these pages in your composition notebooks. Step 4: Teacher will assign extra practice or tutoring another student. On Day 1 all students progressed from Step 1 to Step 2. No one finished step 2 entirely. I roamed from table to table answering questions and placing green stars on papers. Day 2 was perfect. I was a little frantic for the first 10-15 minutes as I ran around with my clip board answering questions, giving green stars, and double checking to make sure everyone was working on the step they were supposed to be working on. But there was a moment, about 20 minutes into the class, when about half of my students had finished step 4, received a green pen, and been assigned to another student who was working on another step. All of the sudden I became an observer to the learning that was happening. I still monitored progress and answered an occasional question, but the students who were assigned to tutoring were doing a GREAT job! They were sitting there, green pens in hand, talking about greatest common factors and common denominators and reciprocals and exponents. This is what I want my class to look like. Things I'm still smiling about: 1. The look on each student's face when they reached step 4 and I handed them a green pen. I have written about green pens before, but I haven't used them a lot in this class. I didn't feel like these students were ready. But on this day I trusted them and they exceeded my expectations. The green pen truly conveys confidence to a student. Students feel honored to receive it. 2. When I borrowed someone's green pen and they said "May I please have the green pen of power back?" 3. Four students who got everything completed and were assigned to extra practice on white boards. They kept asking me for more problems so that they could race. I was using this set of problems from Kate's rational expression speed dating since I already had them printed out. These are not easy, but these "struggling" students were asking for more. 4. Realizing that these students are mastering the exact same content as my advanced algebra 2 classes. We are going more slowly, pausing more for reinforcement and review, but they are doing the same sets of practice problems and the same tests. I was not sure that this would be possible. But maybe it is. 5. My superintendent walked in to visit when the green pen students were all paired up and tutoring away. She is always welcome, of course, but it was nice that she got to see a moment that I was particularly proud of. And a few reflections: 1. I am wondering if the green pen is so powerful because I use it constantly. I am always walking around, looking at students' work, and giving them green stars when they are good to go. Students might view it as kind of an authority thing. Hence, the way they feel when they receive "the green pen of power". 2. Using multiple steps for review was a win! I noticed that when students got to step four, they were pumped that I assigned them to tutoring rather than extra practice. And the few who finished up on tutoring were not surprised or upset when I told them they were ready for extra practice. It was right there on the board, so no one was surprised. Truth, I really only cared that everyone made it through step 2. There would have been so many missed opportunities if I had let them stop there! So, I have plenty of days that don't go as planned, but this was a great day. Here's hoping something in this post will serve to help me re-create it more often. :)
FREEBIE Worksheet, Bell Work, Guided Notes, PowerPoint and Much More to Help you Teach Your Lesson on Simplifying Radicals.
Kindness Explorer Activity Pack Enhance any kindness lesson with these kindness activities. The goal of this Kindness resource is to help children develop an understanding of what it means to be kind and also to help them become more aware of doing acts of kindness. This resource includes: *1 Kindness Explorer Game Board *54 KIND/UNKIND Scenario Cards *Kindness Scavenger Hunt {School Edition} *Kindness Scavenger Hunt (Home Edition) *Beginning Reader Kindness Scavenger Hunt (Home Edition) color & b/w *Beginning Reader Kindness Scavenger Hunt (School Edition) color & b/w *KIND KID Word Search If you like this resource, then you might also like: Gratitude Lesson w/ Gratitude Journal Bucket Filler Activities Self Esteem Workbook Please remember to follow my store to find out about new products and future freebies! You can find additional resources on kiddiematters.com Thanks for stopping by!
Research based teaching strategies you can use today with a free printable chart.
Wow!!! I don't know about you, but the past few weeks have been CRAZY!!!!! I know we havn't blogged much, but you know how it is.....classr...
Are you scaffolding or rescuing your students? Learn the difference, which is important to use in your classroom, and why with these teaching tips!
How to structure learning stations with Google Classroom, docs, slides, and forms; 10 ways to use learning stations with online teaching and remote / distance learning
What kind of posters do you have on your classroom walls? How do you use them? We all try to prepare the best learning environment for ...
Need to know how to help students write summaries? These lesson ideas and summarizing ideas and tips for the upper elementary classroom will help you teach summarizing and help your students write summaries as they read.
Teaching Career Exploration in the classroom is an important part of social-emotional learning and character education. Kids should start thinking about what they want to be when they grow up by considering their interests and strengths, and how they can apply that to a career. #careerexploration
Do you struggle to plan P.E. games for your students? Here are a few resources that elementary teachers might find useful when planning P.E.
A behavior notebook is a whole-class management technique for recording classroom misbehavior that integrates student reflection & ownership. It can quickly be implemented with any existing rules and discipline plan, and is used as an alternative to other methods such as a clip chart, card system, or writing names on the board. Each student …
Students are expected to come to every art class with a PENCIL & ERASER. EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT OUR ART PROGRAM Even though we do not have an art studio this claymation…
Differentiating your instruction can be overwhelming. I get it. When you hear the word "differentiation" do you automatica...
I think we can all agree that if you are a teacher, you will occasionally come home stressed out, right? There are a variety of reasons for the stress. If the reason is due to a student with behavior problems I have a tip for you. You know the Oprah shows with Dr. Phil when he is talking to a guest and he says "how's that working for you?" When I find myself stressed out about a student and his/her behavior which is affecting the delivery of my instruction and the chemistry of my class, I ask myself "how's that working for me?" I write down the strategies that I have been using. Then I look at why those strategies don't work with this student. The next thing that I do is take careful documentation. I need to know what day and time of day the behavior is worse. Once I can see a pattern I can investigate to see why some days or times are better than others. Is Thursday morning a bad day? Maybe the student had an extracurricular activity the night before that caused the him/her to go to bed later than normal. Tired and cranky students are not at their best in the classroom. The behavior form below is a quick and easy form to use. Choose two target behaviors such as keep hands to himself/herself when lining up and blurts out during circle time lessons. Put a tally mark to document the number of reminders you give the student to keep hands to him/herself or about blurting. Click HERE to download this freebie. Looking for more tips? Check out my Behavior Management Pinterest board. Click on the picture below. Fern has a few tips about documentation to share with you, too. Be sure to hop over to her blog! Fern and I are adding something new this summer. Summer is a great time to catch up on your reading. I love to read teacher blogs and the latest teacher idea books. Stop by Fern's blog and my blog each week for Tuesday Teacher Tips. We hope you will share your ideas, too. Each week we will choose one person who shared a tip on our blog who will get a $10 shopping trip. We will announce the winner in the following Tuesday's post. The winner for this post will be announced on July 15th's post. The winner of last week's post is: Click HERE to read Kimberly's tip which is located in the comment section. Do you have a documentation tip to share? Be sure to include your email so I can contact you if you're the winner of the $10 shopping trip. Looking for more ideas? Check out these! An InLinkz Link-up
There’s nothing like some good team building activities to get your family, friends or youth group working together and learning to depend on each other. Here’s a few of our favor…
Have you ever had a class with so many difficult, disruptive students that you felt that you could barely even teach? What can you do to get past it? In this post, I am going to address this problem with my best advice, and some advice from others as well.
Here’s a few classroom procedures that have worked well for me – and a couple awesome ideas I’ve run across since I’ve stepped out of the classroom...
10 inexpensive rewards to use in your middle school class.
Online ESL game resources for teachers. Suitable game ideas for online english teaching. Perfect for students when they need a break in the online classroom
Learn about spiraling standards in the classroom, and why it is a more effective way of teaching. Learn five tips for incorporating spiraling into your own classroom.
Kagan strategies are nothing new – if you haven’t been to a conference then surely you know a teacher who has. I was one of those teachers that absorbed all the information teachers could give me about Kagan Learning since I was never lucky enough to attend. While I pushed cooperative learning and being interactive, […]
My favorite teaching units are my research and rhetorical analysis unit. I love teaching rhetorical analysis and assigning students a rhetorical analysis PAPA square. Read on to learn more about the rhetorical analysis PAPA square activity and to sign up to receive your own free copy! I love providing my students with the knowledge and resources they need to critically read and analyze text, know why it is powerful, and understand how the author crafted it. I feel that truly understanding the language and the text, primarily through rhetorical analysis, is something that makes all of my students critical thinkers.
Learn the systems I use to make organizing project based learning (PBL) simple and effective. This includes my awesome learning wall!
The biggest challenge with teaching middle school is the race against the clock! Ideas for how to structure a 60 minute class period.
5 key reasons to teach students to analyze differing perspectives
The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. Try one for yourself and let us see it!
Do you want to know the secondary classroom procedure I can't live without??
At the beginning of last school year, I was excited to be teaching a new grade at a new school in a new district. I had made a big change, and it was just what I needed. To add to all of the "new", I was starting the year with 30 students. Thirty is definitely on the big size as it is, but we all know that new kids trickle in over the course of most school years...and last year was no different! By the time the school year was over, I was sharing my classroom with 34 awesome 5th graders. We all learned a lot, grew a lot, and had a pretty good time while doing it! It was definitely a learning process for me, and hopefully I can share some of what I learned to make your year better for you! 1. You've Got to Embrace It Here's the thing, your class size is your class size whether you like it or not, so you've got to embrace it. It's going to be crazy. It may get chaotic. It's going to be crowded. But your attitude will be a major determining factor in the kind of year you and your students have. Now, I'm not saying that my teammates and I didn't take time to vent about the added challenge we were facing; we're only human! But throughout the year, I'd joke "I'm mentally preparing for how I'm going to respond when [my principal] comes to tell me that I'm getting my 33rd/34th/35th student." You may have to "fake it till you make it" but having the most positive attitude you can will go a long way. 2. Room Arrangement While I'd wrapped my brain around having a big bunch of kids, I was having a harder time figuring out how all those desks were going to work in my smallish classroom. That might have been the part that was the most stressful for me. Luckily, my students were OK with all the experimenting I did while trying to figure out the best room configuration for us. I want to share with you guys some of things that worked for me. Push groups of desks together. I started the year with 8 teams of 4 since my district is a big believer in Kagan cooperative learning. That meant that there were teams and desks wall-to-wall. Then I decided to push the teams together so desks were in groups of 8-9. This made a HUGE difference. Kids were still in their teams of 4-5, but we gained a LOT of floor space which made it easier to move around. Find a way to give kids space to spread out. One thing I noticed as the year went on was that we were so packed in there that kids didn't have a lot of personal space and I could see levels of grumpiness increasing because of that. I let them work at my small group table, in a quiet spot on the floor, etc. You have to get a little creative, but your students will thank you if they have a place to momentarily "escape". Get rid of your desk. It's surprising how much extra space this will give you. Use your small group table as your "headquarters". Give flexible seating a shot. When I got my 34th student, I knew that I could either fit 34 desks into my classroom or keep my sanity. I couldn't do both. I'd used flexible seating at my old school, but was trying to not rock the boat too much at my new school. I reached out to my principal and told her I'd like to try some flexible seating. I know not everybody is ready to jump into flexible seating, but here are a few things you could try. Sweet talk you custodian like I did and see if any tables are available. They take up a lot less room than desks. Take the legs of a table and have a low table. It doesn't technically give you more space, but the room will feel more open. You can get rid of a handful of desks and provide some floor seating options like pillows, stadium chairs, or rocker seats. These all can get tucked away nicely at the end of the day. Move to community supplies and if you don't have cubbies, etc., provide bins (they can be cheap!) for your kids to keep their personal supplies in. 3. Have your students help! One thing that every teacher deals with is having about a million things at a time running through their head. Having a large class can make that even worse. There are just SO MANY moving pieces. And teachers (including me) often have a hard time delegating responsibilities. At one point, it really hit me - "There are 34 people in this room who are not me. How can they help me more?" I know that I am lucky in that I teach 5th graders who are pretty capable of having different responsibilities in the classroom, but I think that students at any age can do a lot more in the classroom than they may be doing. And I found that having students help with the little things honestly freed up some much needed space in my brain as well as making the classroom run more smoothly. Plus, kids of all ages LOVE having jobs to do! Here are some of the little "tasks" I had students help me out with: Changing the date on the board Being in charge of taking our library cards to/from the library Putting homework in student mailboxes Grabbing my walkie-talkie at recess time Turning on and/or connecting the projector when we were going to use it (I've got kind of a clunky set up) Taking tardy passes down to the office on the way to lunch or recess (without me asking!) 4. Delegate I know we're not all lucky enough to have parent or other volunteers, but if you do, USE THEM! It took me a while to get into the swing of the best ways to use volunteers, but I found that using them to both work with students and help me out with tasks was the best combination. I've always had parents who can't come in to help because of work, but say they could help at home. In the past, I never used them much, but once I realized that I could send laminating home to be cut or booklets to be stapled, those parents became a great resource. Even if students were playing a math game or something like that and were fine working on their own, I'd ask a parent volunteer to take them into the hallway or another common area to work just to free up a little space in the classroom. Let go of the perfectionism and have volunteers hang up bulletin boards or classroom displays. If it's not perfect, I promise you're the only one who will notice. Get in the habit of asking yourself, "Could somebody else do this?" and if the answer is yes, and you have someone that can do it, let them. That frees up more time for you to do the things only you can do like planning and grading. 5. Don't grade it all! It's hard to ignore the fact that you've got a big class when you have a giant stack of papers to grade sitting in front of you. Thirty plus math tests, essays, reading assessments, etc. is a LOT. One of my good friends is also a 5th grade teacher in my district and she only had 19 kids. I spent way to much time lamenting the fact that I had 15 more math tests to grade than she did! Grading those summative assessments is unavoidable, but really think about what else you need to grade. Do you need to take the time to look over 30+ homework assignments, or could you review them with the whole class? Do you need to grade every piece of classwork or can you quickly scan through it to use as a formative assessment? Can you give a short exit ticket at the end of class and not have to review entire pages of math to see if your students got the concept? This is one area where you can really save yourself some time and sanity. 6. Make time for every student One thing I found was that when you have so many kids in your class, it can be really easy to unintentionally let some kids slip through the cracks during the day. So I made a point to be at my door in the morning to greet everyone (while I let the students take on some of those beginning of the day tasks I mentioned above). All of my students have numbers, and those numbers are on popsicle sticks to make sure everyone is getting called on during the day, but I'd also write a few kids' names on sticky notes and stick them on my cart or my projector. That may make me sound like some kind of absent-minded professor, but if you've had a big class you know that it's easier than it should be for kids to "hide" when there are a lot of classmates around. I also did"lunch with the teacher" for small groups at the beginning of the year just for a chance to get to get to know all of my students a little in a smaller setting. Then it was a popular reward/incentive for the rest of the year - I think we all enjoyed spending time together with a little less chaos. Whatever system or structure you use, make sure you are intentional about making every student feel like they are seen and heard - even if you have to leave sticky notes for yourself! :) 7. Routines & Procedures I know that I'm not telling you anything new when I say it's important to have routines and procedures set up to make things run smoothly in your classroom. We all know that. But with 34 students in the room, I found that I had to run the ship a little tighter than usual. Normally turning your homework in when you come in in the morning is a simple process, but have you ever watched 3 dozen kids try to turn their homework in at once? Gets a little crazy. I added a second homework turn in location, and then gave a student the job of collecting both piles. (See Tip #3!) We ended up having to form two lines when lining up after lunch or recess because it's hard to get an orderly line when you have students waaaaaaay back at the end of the line. Each classroom is (obviously) different and those are just examples of two things I put into place last year to help me manage all my students and keep my sanity! I encourage you to think about ways you could put a routine into place where maybe things have been a little free flowing? What's making you the craziest? Can you change a procedure or make a "rule" to help out with that? It'll help you keep control of the chaos and your students will appreciate the structure, too! If there are some behaviors popping up in your students that you'd like to get a handle on before they get too out of control, click here or on the picture below to check out how I use Individual Behavior Goals in my classroom. Do you have a big class this year? Leave a comment to tell us how many students you have and any tips or tricks I haven't mentioned!
If your non-English speaking students aren't ready to do the regular class work, what should you have them do instead? This handy tool can help.
First, a *big* congrats to the two winners of my Bloglovin' Giveaway: Andrea K. & Cathy P.! Check your email, ladies, and you get the choice of any two products from my store :) Now, onto something I am sososo excited about! I came across a fantastic idea on Pinterest from Sugar Blossoms and had to share it with you all as soon as I could! Click the image above to be taken to T.J.'s super-cute site Sugar Blossoms T.J. at Sugar Blossoms not only came up with the greatest set of classroom cheers, she also made reminder cards and videos to show each one- yahoo! As soon as I saw these, I immediately thought of using them as alternatives to our class' 10-Finger Woo! You can read all about that HERE, but the short of it is that anytime a student volunteers/shares an answer/does something awesome in my class, I'll say, "Let's give so-and-so a 10-Finger Woo!" and we'll all wave our fingers at that person and give a short "Woo!". It's a lot of fun :) I'm loving these great alternatives to spice it up throughout our school year- I think my initial favorites are the Firework Cheer, Raise the Roof, and Snap & Cheer. I cannot wait to try them out with next year's class! For more in-depth description of each cheer, as well as a video of each, be sure to head to Sugar Blossoms! Do you use similar cheers in your class? What are some of your favorites?
Are your worksheets contributing to meaningful learning, or just keeping students busy?
Hi Friends! As teachers we have to collect lots of data on our students throughout the year. This data drives our instruction. I work...
