You don’t want to think about math lesson planning – or anything else school related – for at least a month
I understand math lesson planning is the last thing you want to think about right now. Whether you’ve just finished the school year or you have a few more days to go, you are just so over it right now. Days in the calendar are closer than they appear, though, and before you know it, August is here and instead of your very organized curriculum, laid out with lesson plans by the day and week, with virtual manipulatives all in their little coordinated boxes, your plan looks like this.
Because Teacher Appreciation Week is every week, we’re spending the summer curating educational resources
Remember a few weeks ago when I said that Teacher Appreciation Week is every week? Well, I meant that. We have hundreds of videos, PowerPoints, lesson plans and activities to teach math, social studies and language arts for grades three through eight but the truth is that these are sort all thrown together like the room above.
A while back, I got around to organizing our PowerPoints and pdfs on fractions into topics like, “What is a fraction?” and “Converting from mixed form to fraction form.” The videos were still in a mess, though. It took me all morning to get our videos on teaching fractions into nice categories sorted like this, with descriptions. You can check out the new page here.
Understanding fractions – What is a fraction, anyway?
- Understanding fractions – explains how Native American children could use fractions to keep track of time
- What is a half? – An explanation of what is a half, using multiple examples from travel to shapes.
- Is one-half fair? – How many times have you heard kids insist something wasn’t fair? This video uses fractions and the concept of one-half to determine if two people are doing the their fair share of the work, getting their fair share of a pile of blankets.
- What’s a numerator? What’s a denominator? – Parts of fraction explained with a pile of fish.
This is how the fractions videos looked before this morning. Basically, mixed in with everything else and no useful description.
This is just a start. We are spending our summer creating a teacher resource site for you.
What’s going to be in the site, you ask? For a start, you can search or browse through topics; math, social studies, English/ Language Arts or English as a Second Language, as well as Tech Support for our games.
Most useful, we are organizing our resources into lessons, by topic, with videos and PowerPoints. Need an introduction to fractions ? Here you go, with all the resources you need all in one page. What do you want to do next? Adding like fractions? Comparing like fractions? Here is a link to that.
So … that is what I am spending my summer creating. I know that you are busy and don’t want to think about it now, but if you aren’t on our mailing list, you really want to sign up now. Even if you ignore the newsletter for the next few weeks – or the whole summer – when school is rolling around again, you are going to be really glad to be reminded of us and all of that lesson planning that was going on while you were taking a well-deserved rest on the beach.
