Odds and Ends

A couple of weeks ago my laptop died right after I had finished uploading the free materials to The Teaching Oasis. I was worried that I had lost all my files... and no, I hadn't backed them up so I was super nervous. I mean I had most of them on my school laptop but personal documents and pictures were only located on my personal computer. My gracious sister offered to buy me a new laptop (she had a Dell line of credit) so I accepted the offer. After almost paying Geek Squad to tell me if my files could be recovered I did some searching on the net. And low and behold... I found out that I could get a screwdriver and take my hard drive out of my dead laptop. Go to Best Buy and spend $30 on a case to make it an external hard drive. After my new laptop arrived, I hooked up my old hard drive and ALL my files were there. Fonts, Desktop, My Documents, Pictures... everything! I was so happy!

So it snowed here in central Virginia yesterday and the roads are clear but I have no good reason to be out there in that slush so I'm spending a quiet day at home playing with my new laptop. I even created something today, a Peer Writing Checklist.

I took a snapshot of the document with Microsoft Word and loaded on Google Docs (I've never used that before) to see if this will work. Let me know what you think and if you think you can use this in your Writing Workshop.

 



Then I created a Conversation Heart Math Activity for my students.

Would love feedback... do you think you'd use the Writing Checklist in your classroom?

Bunny Marshmallow Math

I love to incorporate food into my math lessons! Last year I found the cutest Bunny Marshmallows at Walmart (or any grocery store including Target). I created this packet for my second graders:

Bunny Marshmallow Math

I revamped it slightly for my third graders this year.
Bunny Marshmallow Math 3rd

I usually buy 3-4 bags of bunny marshmallows and give each child about 15-20 in a ziploc baggie. Hopefully you can utilize this activity in your classroom. Happy Spring!

Word Problems

Well tomorrow is my first day back to school since my surgery. I'm hoping to make it through the day...
Anyway, as I was sitting here doing lesson plans for the upcoming week, I realized I am teaching additon and subtraction word problems this week. After searching "math key words" on Pinterest I created this document from all the ideas that I saw.
Word Problems

How do you teach your students to solve word problems? Leave a comment below!

Rounding Task Cards

I've started my Place Value unit and one of the standards requires the students to round numbers to the nearest ten, hundred and thousand. I created some task cards to use with the unit.

How do you teach rounding? Share a lesson!

Rounding Task Cards

Survived the 1st Week!

It has been an exhausting first week of school but I'm loving every minute of it! I love my new school, my new teammates and my new third graders! One thing I've learned this week is that a good teacher is a good teacher regardless the school or grade! But I must say that my biggest fear is that I won't teach math effectively. So I've really been following my school systems curriculum framework for math. The first 3 weeks of school is spent reviewing addition and subtraction strategies and properties of addtion. So I used the posters they created(I had to make them cuter) and began teaching. I shared them below, please share your favorite method for reviewing addtion and subtraction facts!


Addition Strategy Posters

Subtraction Strategy Posters

Addition Properties

Conference Calendars

You can read all about my Data Binder on my classroom website http://www.mswinston.com/data%20binders.html . Last year I used a monthly calendar to schedule my math, reading and writing conferences and lets just say that calendar got a little crowded by the end of the month! I kept telling myself I would make separate calendars for the various subjects but I'm just getting around to it. Hopefully these 3 simple calendars will keep me much more organized next year!

Conference Calendars