Blog Posts I Love--Part 5

Another post of blog posts I love. I found some great ideas this week and want to share them with you. 

1. From Embrace the Drawing Board--The game integer-nary. It is like pictionary, but with integer equations. For example, a student might draw the equation -3+7=-4. Then on a white board, they model it and then their team has to guess what equation it is. I am doing this in my math centers as soon as we get back from Thanksgiving. The students can also move to modeling expressions like 4x+5 and algebraic equations like x+3=10. 

2. The week before Thanksgiving the students had a science benchmark. Our schedule was different for the day and I wanted to have an interesting activity for my homeroom to do afterwards. 

Enter--Hexaflexagons. At Math=Love she shares how she introduces the whole lesson. My students LOVED making these. I had instruction, but lost the copies. But most of the students were able to figure it out on their own by watching the videos linked in the blog post. I did have the template for them to cut out. 

This is one of my student's hexaflexagon. 

 

3. Counting Circles from Who is a Math Nerd?

This is a whole group activity that has students count by a certain number. Say you start counting by 10s but you start at 63. Or you count by 1 1/4, but you start at 1 1/2. It is a mental math routine and I can already imagine it being helpful to my students. We have transition time and sometimes we wait for other classes to be ready to switch. This could be a helpful activity during that time. But I would also like to make time for it in class because I would like to give the students time to have a discussion about their counting.

4. Smart Classroom Management

I just found this blog and I love it. It is a classroom management blog--which is one thing I am always trying to be better at. Good learning cannot happen if there isn't good classroom management. I feel like most good classroom management is just common sense and begins by treating students as people with needs and wants. This post is about letting students get out of their seats and establishing routines. I plan to go through this blog thoroughly.