Brain Challenge

Without lifting your pencil, can you connect all of the dots with 4 straight lines? If you show me how to complete this you will win a prize from your lovely teacher.

 

Order of Operations: Pemdas

Today we went over PEMDAS to explain the Order of Operations. If you need further help or to study, please use this website.

Here is a Flocabulary Video you can watch.

Also there is a good StudyJams video here that will also help.

And of course....games:
Millionaire Order of Operations
Order of Operations

 

 


             

Scientific Notation

Happy Monday kids! Today we began our exploration into scientific notation and this is something that you will encounter for years to come in math class. To get a jump start and a good solid base for your middle school math class, here are some resources.

Game

Scientific Notation Concentration


 

Kindness Boomerang Video

I showed this to the class last week for video Friday. I was critical of it because all of the diverse characters were playing homeless people or blue collar employees so I decided not to post it, but one of my students requested that it be put on the blog.

I previewed the video prior to showing it to the class and did notice how many stereotypes were shown, but made a decision that the message was still a good one so it was worth showing. Was it the right thing to do? That question is certainly up for debate. I think it was alright as long as I have a discussion with my students about the stereotypes that they saw and what message those stereotypes help to send and perpetuate discrimination. I also am going to ask my class to reflect and think about this question: if they were to recreate the video, what changes would they make and why? What do you think? Send your thoughts below.
 

CEESA 2015 Tool: Gapminder World

Time for our third installment. Today I have for you an amazing resource that is information and amazing to play with (you have to pry my fingers from the computer once I get started!) Gapminder World is a wonderful website that gives you a graphic display of data from around the world from many different topics and shows growth over time from different countries. If I were you, I would click full screen and just play around with it. There are so many different ways this can be used in the classroom. If you get a chance to use it, share what you did below!


 

CEESA 2015 Tool: Newsela

The CEESA 2015 tool of the day is a website called Newsela. Here you will find popular news articles that you can read by Lexile reading levels. When you click on an article, tabs will be included on the right with different reading levels. This is a wonderful tool for students and teachers and makes the news accessible for more students.

If you want more information on Lexile Reading levels you can go here and see the Lexile to grade correspondence and much, much more.
 

CEESA 2015 Tool: Newspapermap.com

I had a wonderful time in Dubrovnik sharing my behavior expertise and learning from some amazing educators. The last day's Keynote speaker was Heidi Hayes Jacobs and she was so fantastic that I went to her other session too. She talked about the importance of building global citizens for a changing world and shared some amazing, amazing, amazing resources. You can find more about her and what she offers to the field of education at her website Curriculum 21.

Today, I showed the class newspapermap.com. This is a tool that shows a map of many of the newspapers written around the world and will translate them into many different languages. The kids loved exploring it and sharing their learning with their classmates. It gave me a chance to show them a newspaper from my hometown and kids also explored news from places that interested them. The excitement and conversations were fantastic and the students were making many observations and connections to previous learning this year. Check it out if you get a chance.

  

Growth Mindset: Mistakes, Challenges and Failure Lead To Learning!

With the Final Exhibition beginning, I have been teaching some lessons on growth vs. fixed mindsets. Today we discussed how mistakes, challenges and failure make us feel and then examined why this is. The kids were then asked to think of these in a positive light. They came up with some great responses for when these are positive events. They loved watching this video and asked me to share it on the blog so that they could view it again.