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 Even this blog has 10 unpublished drafts right now.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?