Math Resources

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A friend of mine posted a link to this on Facebook and I've probably had it bookmarked for well over a month and just now got around to looking at it.

Some of my favourites on this list are ones that get students talking, that don't necessarily have a "right" answer or just get students thinking in a different way!

I probably looked through about half of the sites but some of my favourites (using the numbers at the side) are numbers 3, 30, 40, and 41.  They could be used in a number of ways... to start a class, to end a class, to do for an entire class, to start the morning, afternoon, or after a break... your possibilities are endless!

Which resources are your favourite and how would you use them in your classroom?

What's Wrong With Your....

As the weather gets warmer you tend to have to wear less layers... BUT because of central air conditioning for me this usually means bring a sweater to throw on if needed but feel free to wear sandals.  So through June-September sandals is what I wear complete with some lovely painted toe nails which have drawn the attention of many curious fingers.

The day was not unlike any other... I had the students on the carpet to read them a story and then was explaining to them what we would be doing.

"Are there any questions" I asked the class of grade 2 students

"yes, I have a question" says a boy in front who has shoot up his hand.  "What's wrong with your toes?"

Sure, maybe I don't have perfect toes and maybe they were not like this little boys at all but I didn't know anything was wrong with them.

I actually don't recall how I responded.  What I do recall is that as I was gathering the kids up to head back to their spots this young boy was trying to get his friend to also notice my toes and tell him what was so odd about them likely!

*SIGH* it seems like just yesterday I had a lovely group of kindergartners that were practically fighting over who would get to massage my feet next.

I don't recall how the rest of the day went... I'm sure I never made the mistake of wearing sandals in that class again!

Edgar Degas for Grade 1 and 6

On top of teaching basic French to students in grades 4 through 6 I had a few periods a cycle of coverage. Usually the teachers just asked me to do whatever I wanted with them and what I wanted to do with them was art. So we did art!

You may remember many years ago when I did some Edgar Degas art with my grade 4 class. I remembered getting oodles of compliments on the art (why I got the compliments is beyond me... my art was not up on the wall!) but they had difficulty making the actual tin foil people. So this past year I did it with my grade 6 class and there was a lot less trouble with the couple of additional years.

I had one bulletin board in the front lobby to use as mine for whatever I wanted and so I often had students art up on there. The problem was I often was teaching more than one art class at a time.

Here's a great example of how I had 2 very different grades (grade 1's and 6's) study the same artist (Edgar Degas) but do art that was appropriate to their age level. The grade 1's did the ballerina's (which very few actually grumbled about) and the grade 6's did the tin foil pieces and they all went up on the same bulletin board.

Ta Da!

The process was pretty simple. I Always, always, ALWAYS started off all my classes with the lower grades with a book... I think I found a couple of fictional books from the library that had ballerinas in them. So I read those to them.

Then I showed them what we were going to be doing on Artolazzi and we all practiced our best ballerina pose.

We had already dyed the coffee filters in a previous class (just use washable markers and a spritz bottle... we couldn't do them the day we were doing the rest of the project because they would be wet. I didn't make any colour suggestions or anything... they did whatever they wanted.

For the art the first thing we did was glue down the ballerina's skirt. This helped them to draw the body proportional to the skirt. Then they did the drawing of the person and making a background. 

It was perfect and lovely and quick and easy. Perfect for first graders!

French classroom Before*During*After

Now that summer is basically done why not show you a picture of my fabulous French classroom. 

This was what I walked into... yes the picture is a little skewed BUT the classroom is actually very large.

Here's what it looked like after I put all my fabulous touches in it

And here is what it looked like at the end of the school year

Yikes! What happened you ask!?!

The school was doing a big reshuffling of classrooms to put them in an order/location that made more sense. And... they were actually getting rid of the French room altogether. Well, they weren't getting rid of the physical classroom... how odd would have that been considering it was in the middle of the school. They just weren't having a room for French any longer because classroom teachers were going to teach their own French the following year. This meant that the wall that my white boards were on was coming down to give my next door neighbour a MASSIVE classroom (which is pretty much the size of all the classrooms... lucky kids get to really spread out at that school!). Because of the big reshuffling they needed somewhere to store everyone's stuff and well... my lovely room became the dumping ground for all things to be moved and all things to be garbaged. Lovely.

The nice part of all of this was that I certainly couldn't teach in a room that looked like this... could I?

So from about the 2 week mark before school let out I started teaching from the students classrooms (or the library in some cases) which meant we played a lot of bingo or watched movies in French (with English subtitles)... which gets a lot less complaints than you may think. This also meant that I could take down all my stuff from the walls and pack up my classroom 2 weeks before school let out. 

Let's just say on the last day when everyone else was making lists of stuff to do over the summer and scrambling to get stuff put away I was sitting back with my feet up and my bowl of bonbons (or maybe I was helping them clean up and reminding them that I was on the sub list for next year)