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Calendar in the Primary Classroom

Classroom calendars used to be commonplace in nearly every first grade classroom, and even a lot of second grade classrooms.  As the push for standards accountability has grown, I’ve noticed fewer and fewer teachers implementing calendar in their classrooms because the “standards” don’t “dictate” it. Or, because they just are feeling the time crunch and with the struggle to fit everything in, calendar has been cut. My classroom calendar is the single biggest tool for

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Math Block Structure

How I Schedule My Math Block: Instruction & Centers Structure

For my first several years of teaching, I struggled with teaching math. I tried teaching what I thought was Guided Math to my small groups. I hated it and didn’t feel like I had enough time to teach my students. I tried teaching whole group, but too many students struggled to stay engaged and I struggled to see the work they were doing to provide feedback and support. For a year and a half I

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9 Activities for Building Place Value and Number sense in the middle grades with base ten blocks

Building Place Value and Number Sense Skills

When I was an interventionist looking at our schoolwide data, I noticed something in our students’ math data.  The students in third grade that scored lowest in math overall on our benchmark testing (NWEA’s MAP test), were the lowest scoring in the place value and number sense sub-domain. As time has gone on, I’ve continued to see that trend- that the lowest achieving students in math, tend to have poor number sense. Here are some

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Distributive Property Image

Introducing the Distributive Property

The first time I taught the distributive property to my third graders I had no idea what I was doing.  There was one (and I think only one) lesson in our textbook and it had students relate the distributive property to basketball where students figured out how many points were scored based on the number of two-pointers and three-pointers.  In theory, it’s a great idea, and I’m sure I could have livened up that lesson

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YouTube math channels

6 YouTube Channels to Help you Teach Math

I like to use videos and songs in my lessons as much as possible, and math videos are no different.  Having a video give a minilesson gives students the opportunity to take a break from me and my voice, which they love.  It also gives me a moment to sit down.  Sitting down and being quiet for a moment is a glorious feeling that doesn’t happen too often in the classroom.  Watching a video also

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