FUN FRIDAY: Ready for summer reading…
If this doesn’t inspire your students to prepare their summer reading list, we don’t know what will! Read more…
Memorial Day ideas
Getting ready to teach Memorial Day lessons before the weekend? You will find lots of ideas on Education World. My favorite is Put the Memory Back in Memorial Day.
How much glue will do?
Do you have young learners or older children with disabilities that make working with glue a bit…..sticky? Read more…
We are featuring some ideas for your learners with low vision today. Over at Sam’s Cool Tools for the Classroom, you will find a post highlighting apps that teach cause and effect, help students with math, and more.
Tin man area project
How can you not love the blog called Misscalcul8? I have been reading more math blogs lately and this has become a fave. Why? Because of neat projects like this one. I love any classroom project that allows students with different needs and abilities to contribute and be appropriately challenged. This tin man area project does just that. Read all about it to figure out how you might teach this lesson in your classroom and how you might differentiate roles and responsibilities.
FUN FRIDAY: Noun town
What else can we say? It is a town….made of nouns! Every student makes contributions. To learn more about the lesson, visit one of our very favorite blogs in the universe, First Grader….at Last! You could make a noun town in a day or you could make a town that grows throughout the year. Any student can participate in this activity, but some learners might simply add “store” or “dog” while others might be encouraged to add more challenging words like “conservatory” or “neurologist”.
Poetry journals at any age
If you don’t have time to implement this idea this year, it might be one to tuck away for September. Read more…
Water writing for the little ones
I have been working with so many preschool teachers lately, so I thought I would share another tip for those of you with little ones. Are your students tiring of the same old tracing and writing activities? If so, bring on the paintbrushes! We found this fun water “painting” idea from Seeking Kingdom First; it can be used for shapes, letters, numbers, or even pictures. And you can also do this project anywhere. On a nice day, for instance, try it outside on the sidewalk! Some students will only be able to do the tracing part, but others may be able to form letters themselves before they are magically erased.
TODD’S TECH TUESDAY: Fun with stickman
Be prepared to lose hours of your life to doodling once you click over to Draw a Stickman. How could you use this in the classroom? To teach and reinforce vocabulary for ELL students, to assess the following of written directions for children with disabilities, to inspire a reluctant writer, to teach young students how to use a mouse, to practice the drawing of shapes or patterns (e.g., draw your stick man using at least 3 hexagons)…your ideas?
What is a year?
I have said this before but I just love the blog, Math in the Middle. We just don’t have enough math blogs or enough middle school blogs out there, and I can always count on this one for a unique and inspiring idea. Today’s pick is this A Year Is… activity. I have often said that we don’t pay enough attention to number sense in our math lessons. This results in learners in high school who can’t answer questions like, “Explain the difference between a million and a billion” or “Approximately how tall is the Empire State Building?” What I love most about this activity is that students may learn as much from their peers as they do from their own research. It is also clearly easy to differentiate. Students can take on a problem that is very complex or one that requires just a few steps.
