Snow Day!

After being out all last week for weather, it's another snow day in Tennessee!

Admittedly, this one wasn't necessary, IMO. Or maybe it's just that I'm like a lot of other teachers and beginning to panic about all that I have to teach my kids in this short time that we have left together. There's so much content that we have left to cover, of course, but there's a lot more than that this year. This group of students has challenged me in a way I've never faced before. I love them, of course, but have you ever just had one of those years where you just knew your kids needed so much more than academics, and there just isn't enough time to meet all of the needs that you see. That's been the story of this year.

I started the year with my colleagues' sympathy and disbelief that all of these personalities had been put into the same room. I cringed when I heard some of the comments because I knew these kids better than that: I knew their hearts, and I saw so much promise. As the year has gone on, I've seen some of them make tremendous progress in ways that no state test will measure, whether that progress is academic, behavioral, or emotional. I'm proud of my kiddos, and I wish that everyone could see what I see in them.

Moving on, I'm trying to find ways to help my students practice their math skills in a way that is both efficient and interesting. In my school, we have a 45 minute intervention block 4 days a week. I am a math, science, and social studies teacher, but for that 45 minutes, I am also a reading teacher. We weren't given any real guidance on what the students who are not in intervention groups should be doing, other than being told that they could not be covering new material. I decided that the best use of this time is review centers. I'll explain my center organization system and how I keep track for grading purposes another time, but for now, I'd like to share a task card set that I just made for my task card center. These have been a great way for my students to review or practice skills that they need a little bit more work on. This new task card set that are available in my TpT store.

We just started working on this topic and our district pacing guide has us only spending a week on it! What?! I know my students are going to need more practice, so I created this task card set with that in mind. I can't wait to start using it later this week when we FINALLY get to go back!

The set includes 20 question cards, a recording sheet, and an answer key to make it self checking and perfect for center use or other games and activities.

   

Just an FYI about this set: I have chosen to focus on just the order of operations and using parentheses and brackets in this task card set. I am working on another activity for working with variables and am hoping to have that completed over the coming weekend. 

I hope you find this set helpful! I know that my class struggled last year with the short amount of time that we had in our pacing guide for this skill, so I'm hoping that it helps my class this year. How do your students do with the order of operations and learning to use parentheses and why? Are you feeling an unusual amount of pressure to get everything in due to snow days this year?

Another year over and a new one just begun

Well, not quite yet. Soon, though, we will be going back. AAHHHH! Where do the summers go?!

I've spent this one at home working on some projects around the house. I've been trying to learn to play the piano, doing lots of cleaning, and trying to get organized so that (hopefully) I don't feel so frantic this coming school year. I would have never guessed that one little person who weighs less than 25 lbs. can SO COMPLETELY turn your world upside down. Sigh. I know I'll miss these days, though, so I'm just trying to soak in all the toddler hugs and sticky fingerprints while they last.

Anyway, school... I'm just finishing up my postcards to my students and hoping to get those mailed out by the weekend.

Do you do postcards or a welcome letter to your kids? This is the first time I've done them, but I really like the idea, even if it is a little bit time consuming. I would have loved getting something from my teachers-to-be when I was growing up.

I've also been working a little bit on some new task card sets to use with my students this year. I'm sharing one today that I actually used last year with my kids, but I didn't have it ready to post until this summer. (Remember how I said that toddler was keeping me busy?)

This set is a mixed multiplication and division review with word problems. I've found that one of our struggles every year seems to be actually reading and thinking about what the word problem is asking for. My students see two numbers and either multiply or divide, but don't always read to find out whether the operation they're using makes sense. Do yours do that too? Please tell me I'm not alone!

This task card set is all word problems, and the division problems may or may not have remainders. I did this because I teach my students to think about what to do with the remainder. We have a discussion and make a chart as a class to help remind them that sometimes the remainder can be ignored, but sometimes we have to round up, even if the remainder is less than 1/2. We talk about problems where they have to split numbers of people into groups, and we have a discussion over how you can't cut a person up.

As always, there are two versions of the cards included - one with a background and one without (to save ink) - and a recording sheet and answer key. Click on the picture above to see it in my TpT store. And while you're there, check out my 1st nine weeks math reviews, which are 50% off until August 1!

Monday Made It!

SNOW DAY!!!

Well, not exactly. More like "really cold and wet day." Temperatures here will be down to around 5 degrees for the next couple of days, and since the roads are wet, everyone is flipping out, cancelling school, and buying out all the milk and bread the stores can stock.

Sigh. Winter in the South.

For the new year, I'd like to challenge myself.

One of my blogging buddies introduced me to an idea a few years ago that has stuck with me: Instead of creating a New Year's resolution (or even several resolutions) she creates one. Well, I guess she doesn't really create it. She chooses one. One word. That word becomes her theme for the year.

My word for the year: share.

Share more. Share more of my creations. Share more of my time. Share more of my self. Share credit (and blame... tee hee.) Share my thoughts. Just to share.

I think that too often we, and I mean human beings, forget to look outside of ourselves. No? Well, I know I do. My hope is that as I share, it will force me to think about others - how I can help, how I can connect, and how I can sometimes even advocate for those that need someone to share a voice.

I set up a TPT store a while back, and I started this blog, but I never add anything to either. Honestly, I love teaching and I love writing and creating. The thing is, I am still trying to get over a little bit of a fear I have of not creating quality "stuff." I am a little bit of a perfectionist, and I'm always afraid of not measuring up. As a result, when I have tried blogging in the past, I have published, deleted, revised, republished, and then deleted again sooooo many posts. I always end up with nothing to show for my efforts. Even this blog has 10 unpublished drafts right now. But this blog is the perfect place to share so many of my thoughts and creations, so it will be my starting point. I'd also like to share my time, but I'll get to how I plan to do that later. I don't have details quite fleshed out on that one yet.

My goal for this blog is to share at least one "something" a week that I have made or used with my kids. And to get started, I'm going to kick it off by sharing two things: 2 sets of task cards that I've made over Christmas Break and can't wait to use with my kids this week!

My school district has a very rigid structured pacing guide, which says that we will be doing some fraction review the first few days back. I decided to add some pizzazz to their lesson by making these task cards. As a bonus, when we're finished with the lesson, they'll go into our task card math station! I love when all that hard work leads to something that you can use multiple times! :-)

Many of these task cards are set up as word problems to reinforce the concept of fractions as division. There are also several cards included that are simple problems to solve or various ways of writing division.

I set up one of the recording sheets so that students would only solve six problems. I've also included a recording sheet that has room for all 24 cards. I don't want to overwhelm my ESOL or Special Needs students, so I may give them the 6 problem sheet copied front and back.

I also included an answer key so that whether we use this set in a group or at a center, it can be self-checking.

The other set of task cards (addition and subtraction of unlike fractions) is set up the same way, but includes 20 word problem cards so that not only are students practicing addition and subtraction with fractions, they're also having to apply critical thinking to reason through the word problems.

To purchase either of these task card sets, just click on the cover photo to visit my TPT store.

Did you make any New Resolutions that you'd like to share?