Monster Month!

  My FAVORITE month of the year. We’ve gotten to know each other, routines are familiar, and it’s time for a project that we work on during the month of October. I posted a great product at TpT  that I hope you’ll check out along with these other great resources. Your students will be reading, writing, solving math puzzles, and more with a monster theme. Monster and Alien Coloring Pages – add this to your sub folder? Easy Ways to Draw a Monster – get your hesitant artists started Free Halloween Clip Art – so much to choose! Monster Songs for Young Children – …

Alien Puzzles and More!

Quick puzzles can add a bit of fun to your math class any time of year. I created a set of alien puzzles that you can use to have students find a number pattern and then solve the puzzles to reveal a math term!     There are 6 different kinds of puzzles – each has its own alien. Choose from full color or black and white images. Students can use a blank form to create a new puzzle for classmates and receive a certificate. You can also find many kinds of puzzles online, including: Brainbox Logic Puzzles, Kid Number Puzzles, and number …

Need Dice for a Game?

How is it possible I can buy dice and somehow they evaporate over time? I know it’s rare for a solid to sublimate into a gas, but every June I end up with far fewer dice than I had in September. And the ones I have can be in pretty bad shape. I hesitate to send dice home with math games because I know they don’t always come back to school. Many of my math games require dice so here’s my suggestion for you: use a six sided pencil! A student sharpens a pencil until it’s too short to sharpen. Do you …

Let’s Play a Bingo Game!

Students in one of my classes are learning fractions so we’re playing Fraction Bingo. Bingo makes it fun for students practice a math skill. Visit Simply Math to find a variety of bingo games that your students will look forward to playing as they practice their math skills. Print the cards, cut squares of scrap paper, and then put both in a zip bag. Students keep their bingo bags in their desks so they can play when there’s just a few minutes to play one game. It’s the “If we finish our work and we’ve done it carefully we can play a game of bingo” approach. It can be a …

Make your spelling program SPARKLE!

How can we support students who may be frustrated with spelling while keeping it fun for the students who find spelling to be very easy? Each week, for my fourth and fifth grade students, I would assign 10 of the 200 most commonly misspelled words. I put the tricky homophones together, like one week was to, two, and too and another week was there, their, and they’re. If I didn’t put them together on the list, it would become “This is the week for two Os in too.” We took a pretest Monday and shared strategies for knowing how to spell words that sound …