Unitizing is not only a mathematical term, but it’s also a business term. Have you ever wondered when businesses ship hundreds of boxes, how do they keep track? By unitizing! The shipping company will unitize…
After ending the Folktale Unit with my class, it was time for a culminating homework project. Each student received a five-page template to create an iFolktale. What’s an iFolktale? Just a template that looks like a…
Teachers know that even the best thought out plans and projects can run into unforeseen problems or situations. That recently happened to me. As my class is nearing the end of the science unit on…
Did you ever think that as a third-grade teacher or even as an elementary teacher you would be teaching the Distributive Property of Multiplication? When I started teaching over 30 years ago, there weren’t even…
My previous posts in this series (Part 1 and Part 2) explained the reasons why I have made the switch to a Digital Notebook because they are colorful, paperless and media rich. I also gave…
My class just recently finished with our Solar System Unit. In my district, which is in California, we are still operating under the old California Science Standards and still using a very outdated textbook. Nevertheless,…
So you want to start using Google Slides™ in elementary grades? But you don’t know where to get started? You’re also not sure how to use them. Or are you students wasting time trying to…
As you may have read in an earlier post, Gerald McDermott is one of my favorite and go to authors to use for read alouds and for teaching. He has a huge collection of diverse…
Do you enjoy using Gerald McDermott’s books in your classroom as much as I do? I have been using his stories for at least 10 years since I discovered them. He is the Caldecott Award…
Soon my students will be taking the Math portion of the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC) in May. So I thought we should revisit the Distributive Property of Multiplication (DPM) since it’s been awhile since we…
It’s coming or it’s already here! Testing with the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) or Partnership for Assessment of College Readiness and Careers (PAARC) has begun or will begin for most students this Spring. My…
Current Close Reading Procedure in my Class I have continued teaching my students to read closely without using symbols for annotation. Our usual procedure is for me to project a page from out social studies…
Is close reading just a fad? Is it just annotating with symbols? Is it something more? Recently, my grade level team and I were in a Data Reflection Session (DRS) with our principal. We started…
Let me start off by saying, that I didn’t want this blog to turn into one big informercial for products I’m selling over at TpT. However, for this standard, I really could NOT find any…
Teaching character analysis is nothing new for California teachers, as it has always been in our ELA standards. But the new Common Core standards take character analysis to a whole new level. This is the…
