By Rachel Lynette
Please welcome Michelle Williams, a 4th grade teacher from Texas. Today she shares a super helpful idea to help students attack large numbers much in the same way they would attack large words. Thanks for sharing Michelle! When students learn how to read, they begin to read words with CVC patterns, but as they encounter more words, they soon realize that as words get larger,
Hello! I’m Ashley from The Teacher’s Treasure Chest! I am so thankful Rachel let me stop by Minds in Bloom! I love her blog and have used several of her products! I have been teaching for five-and-a-half years. For two-and-a-half years, I was substitute teaching. The other three were spent in the primary levels. I am very excited, though, to be starting my adventure into the intermediate
We continue our awesome guest post from Chris of Making Meaning. If you missed the first post about finding time for measurement and data for 2nd and 3rd grade, read more here. Take it away Chris! The Fourth Grade MD standards: As fractions become more important in 4th grade, the percentage of standards in the MD strand goes down to 25% (7 out
Please welcome Chris of Making Meaning. Chris wrote an in depth blog post about finding ways to sneak in measurement and data standards into your classroom each day. It was so good that I decided to break it into two posts. One for 2nd and 3rd grade and the other for 4th and 5th grade. Thanks for sharing these terrific ideas with us Chris! The
I am so very pleased to welcome Dr. Shari Beck of Teaching to Make a Difference to Minds in Bloom. Her in-depth post on developing algebraic thinking shows you exactly how to apply the standards to each elementary grade level. Algebraic thinking is part of one of the major content strands included in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, and a vertical progression
I am so pleased to welcome veteran teacher Vicky (aka SciPi) to Minds in Bloom. This post is full of great tips to help your child succeed in what is often a challenging subject. Success in school starts and continues at home, but many parents feel inadequate when it comes to helping their children with math. While parents can usually find time to read a story
Lucky us, we have a math specialist guest posting today! Read her post to find out how to implement one of the trickier Common Core data standards. In the Common Core, there is a measurement and data standard (MD.B) that I don’t see being addressed in many programs at the third, fourth, and fifth grade levels. It is all about students constructing and using
I am so pleased to host guest blogger Michaela Almeida of Reading Royalty. Her post just may revolutionize the way you assess math! As a child my feelings toward math were lukewarm at best. My distaste for math only worsened as I continued through school, hearing from teacher after teacher that math just “wasn’t a strength of mine.” I found math boring, and I
Yippee, more Common Core Math Strategies! I love this post from second-career teacher Deirdre Calhoun because it is not only well researched but also so very useful. Be sure to see her four “Evil Math Wizard” spells below…and check out her blog! They don’t call me the Evil Math Wizard for nothing. For over 10 years, I’ve challenged my students to think and persevere when solving
I am so happy to host Mrs. BBZ’s guest post because she does an incredible job of demystifying the strategies. As a child I had no idea why I “carried the 1” when doing addition. I just did it by rote. These strategies would have helped me to actually understand addition and subtraction with regrouping rather than just following the steps. And that is HUGE! When I
It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s a great way to review. Just mix the BOOM! Cards in with another set of task cards and put them into a BOOM! bin. Players take turns drawing cards and answering them. They get to keep the cards they answer correctly. But if a player draws a BOOM! card, he must discard all of the cards he has collected.
Counting coins, making change, and solving money word problems are all important skills. Here are some ideas to help you teach them! Counting Coins First off, manipulatives are the way to go, ideally real coins and “play” dollars, but the plastic version is okay. It is fun and satisfying to handle real money, and it echoes real life. This cannot be said for pictures of coins on
Division is the trickiest of the four basic operations. Word problems are also quite difficult for many students. Throw in interpreting remainders, and you have a Trifecta of Confusion in Elementary Mathland. That is unfortunate, because interpreting remainders is an important skill, and it is also part of the Common Core Standards. The trick to interpreting remainders is to really understand the problem and what is
Today, I am trading blogs with Laura Candler of Corkboard Connections! You can read her insightful post about cooperative math problem solving right here and then hop on over to Corkboard Connections to read my post about task cards. Cooperative learning can transform a classroom, but it does take a bit of trial and error to be successful. When I was first trained, I used cooperative learning
I started off making a set of free task cards for upper elementary, but then I decided that the younger set should have some, too, so now there is something for almost everyone! Not only that, but both of these sets are also correlated with Common Core Standards. Measurement Task Cards for Grades 2-3 To complete these cards, your students will be measuring things around
Why use flashcards or worksheets to practice basic facts when you can use a game instead? You can use these free fact strips to make Jenga into a game students will love to play again and again. If you don’t have a class Jenga set already, you can probably find one for a dollar or two at a thrift store. The game requires
