Donors Choose Project Funded!

I just had my fourth Donors Choose project funded!  If you are unfamiliar with Donors Choose, it's a fabulous resource for teachers to request materials needed for their classroom.  Generous donors choose what projects to which they'd like to contribute.  When the project is fully funded, the materials are shipped to your school.

For more information on the vendors from which you can "shop" and request materials, click here.

This time, I requested math literature that would match the rest of my curriculum from Kaplan Learning Company.  You can check out the whole package below by clicking here.

 

Not only is this book great for teaching the various kinds of graphs, but I also had students use it to help them create a line graph to chart the changes in speed for our ramp and toy car experiment in science.

 

 

This is an excellent book (The Moon is Broke Together)!  It talks about the phases of the Moon and how each phase is actually a fraction of a whole (full moon).  The Making Literature Connections - Manual with Books - Grades 4-5 kit that comes with these books has a great activity that has students sort the phases in order of their fractions of the whole.

 

 

Another great perimeter and area activity goes with Spaghetti and Meatballs for All using snap cubes.

 

 

Students can also learn to build, compare, and order decimals with the book above. 

I haven't finished creating/copying all the activities, but I'm telling you, it's well worth the money even if you choose to purchase it with your own money!

How about you?  Do you have any good books to link all the subjects together?

Resources for Teaching Fractions

Throughout my teaching experience, I've always felt that fractions was one of the most difficult things for me to teach.  Maybe it's because learning fractions as a student made me miserable.  Maybe it's because most of my teachers didn't use concrete materials or explain why fractions are important.  Whatever the case, I want to make this unit as fun and practical for students as possible.

I've been pinning quite a bit of resources to help me with this effort, and I'd like to share them with you.  You can browse the entire board on Pinterest by clicking here if you'd like, but I thought I'd share a few of my favs.

Songs.  Songs for teaching anything are awesome!  This is a video about converting mixed numbers to improper fractions.  This tough concept is vital for being able to recognize equivalent fractions.

Candy.  Candy will pretty much motivate any kid to want to do math, no matter how difficult the concept.  Since Valentines Day just happened, you might even have some extra lying around just waiting to be used for such an occasion.

Fraction Strips.  Yes, Fraction Strips.  Those obnoxious things that get torn and misplaced but wait....
Is that a really ingenious solution to all those problems?  Why, yes!  Yes it is!

Put a brade in one end so they're always together.  I also have my students put them in a plastic baggy and staple it to the front of their math notebooks.  No more tearing, no more misplacing them.  Thank you, Pinterest!

Please feel free to add your own ingenious solutions to teaching fractions.  I need all the help I can get!

High Interest Nonfiction Magazines

I just found a really cool website that sells Time for Kids-esque magazines.  They focus on Social Studies and Science, and they present the information in kid-friendly terms.

Kids Discover offers many free worksheets and vocabulary cards that go along with each subject.  You type in a unit of study in the search box.  For example, "Constitution".  When you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will find vocabulary units and teacher's guides you can download.

 

I especially like the prereading activities that present students with a set of statements about the topic.  It asks them to decide whether the statements are true or false before reading.  After reading and discussing the topic, students go back and either correct or confirm their previous guesses.  It also asks them to provide page numbers that support their answers.

 

The best part?  You don't have to buy the magazines to get the free resources!  I find that they are general enough to match up with my units of study without having to buy the magazines, but I think I might buy them in the future.  They look like they have some great nonfiction text features kids can sink their teeth into.

 

Do you use any other magazines for Social Studies or Science?  How about prereading activities?

 

 

 

Great New Series of Books

I just finished reading the first four books in the "S.W.I.T.C.H." series for my latest book review.  These are pretty neat stories about twins that get transformed into various insects by their scientist neighbor's S.W.I.T.C.H spray (Serum Which Instigates Total Cellular Hijack).

 

 

One of my favorite things about this series is the vocabulary is readable on a third grade level, and includes plenty of pictures to support the text.  Another great thing is that readers don't need to start with the first book to understand the characters or plot of each book.  Each volume reintroduces them, but not in a roll-your-eyes-because-you've-read-it-before kind of way. 

I'm always looking for great series books that reluctant readers can sink their teeth into.  Do you have any that you'd like to share?

Patrick Henry Readers Theater

I love to use Readers Theater whenever I can in all subjects.  The problem is that once you get into the upper grades, there aren't too many scripts that are on grade level.  I also find that there aren't too many Social Studies scripts.  So, I made one of my own.

This Readers Theater will help students to become familiar with Patrick Henry's famous speech at St. John's Church that called his countrymen to arms. It works well as either an introduction or a review. It also reviews the difficulty George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had with coming to the decision to declare war on King George. Other concepts mentioned/reviewed: French and Indian War, taxation without representation, Intolerable Acts, The Boston Tea Party, Bacon's Rebellion, burgesses.

You can pick up a free copy at my TpT store by clicking here.

Do you have any Readers Theater scripts you've created?  I'd love for you to share!

Listen to Word Problems

I don't know about you, but my students can always use extra practice with and learn new tools for completing word problems in math.  I recently came across a method that makes it more like a game for partners or trios.  It's called "Listen to Word Problems".

Although this works really well for math, it could easily be applied to science, or any other subject that requires students to systematically process information to come up with an answer.

You can pick up a free copy of this at my TpT store by clicking here.

Do you have any other fun activities for helping students with tackling word problems?

Solar System Videos

I like to use short videos to introduce new concepts or review old ones.  This works well in all subjects, but I've found some really great videos for teaching the Solar System.

This is a rap song that shows and describes the phases of the moon.

Another video about the phases to the tune of "Forget You" by Cee Lo.

This video talks about what makes the seasons (Earth's tilt, proximity to the Sun).

I'm sure there's many more high-interest videos out there to help with teaching about the Solar System.  Care to share?  :)