My first graders came to me with a lot of background knowledge on shapes and their properties. I was impressed with the amount of information they retained from kindergarten and from other learning experiences. Because we didn’t need to spend a ton of time on 2-D shapes it was the perfect opportunity to integrate art into our unit to help students continue to develop their understanding of shape properties and to demonstrate content mastery. Working at an
Fact fluency routines are often filled with worksheets and timed activities. They do have their place in the classroom, but they’re not very engaging. While I’ve definitely learned that fact fluency does not mean 1 second recall and strict timing systems, I also firmly believe that having a strong memorization of facts helps students focus their mental effort and energy on the larger math skills at hand. It’s important to build fact fluency in students.
Over the last several months I’ve been using printable calendars in several different ways in my classroom and at home. I went to download January in anticipation of the new month (I’m on top of my game by 2 days, shocking!) and decided to just create my own. I wanted something in black and white so it’s easy on my printer. The one I had been using had some colors in it, and I just
I work at an arts integration magnet school. We’re all at various levels of comfort with our art integration and I am often looking for new and different ways to incorporate the arts into our day. Part of our job as classroom teachers isn’t just to have the arts present in our classroom, but to also teach relevant concepts with the arts. I have learned a lot in my first couple years in this building,
When I think of my struggles and frustrations from my first few years in the classroom, many of it revolved around all of the materials and resources I was accumulating and where the heck it was all supposed to go. My classroom storage has always been lacking, and there’s so much stuff. I tend to get behind and bogged down during the year and just throw things in places for a quick fix. Then I
