K-5 Math Teaching Resources

How often do you find yourself asking, "isn't there another way I can demonstrate a particular math topic to my students because they aren't understanding what I've been doing thus far"?

Try finding a suggestion at K-5 Math Teaching Resources.

This website has loads of ideas to peruse through.  You can filter your search by grade level, strand, Mental Math Concepts, Interactive Whiteboard ideas, or Centers.


When looking into a grade level of activities, ideas are separated by standard, with links to printables if necessary.







The links to Interactive Whiteboard Resources take you directly to the IWB activity that relates to the concept. 

 
There are many activities ready to use in a centers based environment, providing you have or create the manipulative for the activity (note, they do provide links to download these interatives).  For example these are a few of many ten frame and dot card activities you can use in a number sense center.




There are many Mental Math Activities available, including a nice overview of using empty number lines in your classroom.  And don't forget to check out the ideas for your 100th day of school. 

This website has been a golden goto resource for k-5 math ideas and activities for several area teachers.  Aren't we all looking for additional ideas?

Non Fiction Reading with Newsela

Virgina Petit shared a great resource yesterday for non fiction articles that connect directly to the ELA Anchor Standards of the CCSS.  The clincher with Newsela is the ability to change the Lexile Reading Level of the article, customizing it for the class or the student.  Signing up was easy as a teacher.  It gives a class code to give to the students to sign up for the specific class.  No emails are needed for the students.  Google sign in is also an option.

These are high interest daily news articles focused around the topics war & peace, science, kids, money, law, health, and arts.  There are four different levels offered for each article, with the four ranges varying  from third grade to college prep levels.

Easily assign an article to a class.

 Here is a look at the beginning of the same article at two different reading levels.

660L 

1020L

Quiz adapts to the Reading Level as well.  

If a quiz is avaliable to take with the passage, it will show along the right hand side of the screen.  In the teacher view, it will show the question, the correct answer, as well as the standard the question is addressing.

 Both students and teachers have a binder at the top of the screen.  This allows for the students to see if a specific article has been assigned.  For the teacher, it gives a view of which anchor standards have been addressed, over all class scores, as well as being able to view individual student work.

Student View

This is just another site to add to your resource list.  This site is also iPad compatible, easily add the link to the log in page onto the iPad.
We can never have to many sources for non fiction!
Newsela is currently free and in BETA.

Online Assessments for Understanding Digital Citizenship

Common Sense Media is an absolute awesome web resource for obtaining curriculum addressing digital citizenship topics to your students. 


 There are 8 topic areas of content written in all four grade level stages; K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12.  There are videos, questions, activities, and many resources to assist any teacher with integrating digital citizenship content into their classroom.  All activities are aligned to common core standards.

 

If you look into their scope and sequence of how these lessons are recommended being taught, lessons are broken into groups of approximately 5 lessons per unit.  At the end of each unit is a Unit Assessment.

I decided to take a couple of Unit Assessments to experience what the students will encounter.  There are a variety of question types similar to what you'll be seeing in a Smarter Balance test, that is to say there are very few multiple choice type questions.  Most questions involve higher level thinking like arranging an order of events, or placing items onto different parts of a venn diagram.

Students begin an assessment by typing in their name and an optional email address for their teacher, which will auto send the results to the teacher at the conclusion.  If a student incorrectly answers a question, the program will ask the student to try again, upon which if they miss a second time the correct answer will be revealed.  Only the students first answers are calculated and printed in the assessment results at the end. 

Allow for at least 30 minutes for students to complete the activity, as there are 15-20 questions they need to answer.  Students will be able to print the results of their assessment which shows the question, how the student answered, and the correct answer.

InCtrl - Empowering Students in a Digital Age

Here is a nice resource you can use to begin your digital citizenship discussions with your upper elementary and middle school classes from Cable in the Classroom, Be InCntrl!

They offer seven Lessons, which are basically units containing 3-5 half hour lessons.

• Working Together Digitally
• Living in a Digital World
• Your Digital Footprint: Leaving a Mark
• Media: Between the Lines
• Stand Up ... Be InCtrl!
• What's Mind Isn't (Necessarily) Yours
• In-Credibly Informed

Each Lesson offers a Teacher version of the video, Student version of the video,  and Lesson Materials with Activities which include ready to use printable documents for your class.  Objectives are include along with an estimated time for each section, list of vocabulary terms, engaging questions to ask, and an outlined project. 



The activities provide high level creation opportunities for the students.  For example students create a "Stop the Drama!" campaign which includes writing and distributing a survey for others to complete, analyzing the responses, and putting together a reflection about the findings.  InCtrl provides ideas, links, and resources for all the activities.  All activities are aligned to common core.


This is a great resource you can use to integrate digital citizenship topics into your curriculum.

Digital Citizenship Lessons from FBI - Cyber Surf Islands

We need to be doing as much as we can providing resources for students so they can become educated online digital citizens.  The FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, has created a series of lessons for grades 3-8 in a flash-based game environment called Cyber Surf Island where students are to learn content and then take an exit exam demonstrating their understanding.

Students click into a grade, like Ice Island, and choose from 7 different lessons.  When they have mastered the content they can take the exam.

Lessons include a variety of tasks.  One lesson provide users with vocabulary words to learn and short check for understanding questions.  Another shows video segments from NetSmartz.  Students can complete a word search and learn their definitions.

These lessons might be great to do with one projector and whole class discussion.  Like lesson 6 where students can determine what is actually meant with a common online statement.

Teachers can sign up their school, so their kids take the test, and compete against other schools from around the country to determine if they can make their school appear on the Leaderboard.  Tests are half hour with different questions for each student. 

Who knows, if your schools does extremely well you can even have an FBI agent visit your classroom.

Remind 101 - Texting your Students

Remind101 is a communication tool using the technology everyone is carrying in their pockets, their cellphones.  And as a teacher this communication is one-way, which means those receiving your text messages can't reply back.

Start by creating a free account at Remind101.  After you have signed in you create a class then invite your end users to sign up.  End users sign up procedure is completed by having them send a text to a phone number with the body of the message containing a particular code correlating to the class you created.  If they enter it all in correctly, Remind101 replies back asking for further information from the end user and they are then part of your class.

To send everyone in your class a text message, you go into Remind101, type in the message, and click send.  You can even schedule it to send later.  There is even an option to have a Remind101 widget scrolling on your blog or website.

This is a great tool for elementary teachers to have parents of students sign up so they can be reminded of particular events; for instance a field trip tomorrow so please pack a sack lunch, or conferences next week.  High School teachers can have their students sign up into particular classes so they can remind them of due dates for projects, to study for a test, or even offer problems to solve.

For the people carrying tech tools in their pockets, Remind101 does provide access via iPad or iPod apps, as well as Android or Google Play Apps.

Chromebook 101 Training

12:00    Teaching in a Connected Classroom

•  Digital in the Common Core  :Where is the Tech in Common Core?
•  SAMR  
• SAMR in 120 Seconds
•  Digital Citizenship

12:30   Getting Started

•  Log Ins
•  Differences with the Chromebook
• Keyboard Shortcuts    ctrl   alt   ?   
• Users

1:00    Google Apps

• The Parts of Drive
• Docs
• Presentation
• Spreadsheet
• Form
• Drawing 
• Folders
• Sharing/Collaborating
• Working Off Line 

 1:45  Brain Break! 

2:00   Other parts of Google:  blogger, sites, youtube, google+

2:30   Google Store and Finding Other Apps

• MangaHigh
• Edmodo
• Remind 101 (for teachers)
• The QR Code Generator (for teachers) 

  
3:30   Discussing Plan for Roll Outs and Expectations