Story time in math!

Introduction to the Rational Numbers and Coordinate plane unit for 6th grade math. Your students will surprise you! Clicking this picture will take you to my TpT page.

Back to the old ways...

I have felt very guilty recently because I haven't written any posts since I said that I would write about how the distributive property activity went... I knew that blogging would be difficult once school really got into full swing because once I get home, I have to think about the next day, which takes all of my mental capacity (and often more than I have left).

Since I last wrote, the tablet initiative has been suspended in my school district. There were multiple reasons for this, but what we know is that the company that supplied the tablets is going to be looking for a different product. They will all be replaced, and in the meantime, we are doing things the way we used to.

At first, I missed them. There were certain tools and activities that I had gotten accustomed to that I could no longer do. I grew really attached to the practices on Khan Academy because students could work at their own pace and get immediate feedback. They could even watch videos on that topic if they needed additional help. I was getting the hang of personalized learning.

My students were so happy to get rid of them, though. Technological/connectivity issues plagued them, and they were dying to just go back to paper/pencil for math. I don't blame them. We would do worksheets that had been scanned in. This required them to do work on a piece of notebook paper, but if they wanted to go back and see the original problem, they would have to open the document again.

I now have a better idea of a better way to use the tablets, and look forward to them coming back. I will not use them as an alternative to paper. Especially in math, paper and pencil cannot be replaced. I have a better understanding of activities that can be good substitutes for things that I may have done on paper, and I will definitely utilize things like Khan Academy more.

In the meantime, I'm getting acquainted with BrainHoney. I have taken a course on BrainHoney and liked the layout as an online student. I'm not sure if I'm totally sold on it for use in a 6th grade classroom.

I will also be looking more into this list of the best apps and websites for math! They are aligned to the common core, too!

HAPPY VETERAN'S DAY WEEKEND!

PLE Sites

Personalized Learning Environment... I'm nervous but very excited about it. It is going to be so much easier to do since we are going to have tablets in the hands of every student at our school, but that doesn't mean it's going to be totally simple! Here is a list of sites that can be used by students individually to learn, practice, and move at their own pace. They can be used as part of a lesson or as individual work that may be worked into a lesson.

• powermylearning.org : (FREE) games that students can play that are aligned with the Common Core! 
  
  
  
  
• StudyIsland.com : (NOT FREE) rigorous (but multiple choice) questions that are aligned with the Common Core. This site is not free, but many schools choose to purchase a license for a grade or for the whole school. Teachers can pick individual topics to assign to their students. There is a game mode that can be used for more entertaining question answering. One neat thing about the site is that there is a pre-test for the courses, so students can take them at the beginning of the year to get a taste of what they are going to be seeing. 

• KhanAcademy.org (FREE) Students can watch videos on so many different topics, some of which come with accompanying practice. As teachers, we can build classes of our students and see which videos they have watched. If you have a flipped classroom, you can assign them as homework and then confirm that they watched them this way. Hint: when making your classes, DO NOT think that you have to enter all of their email addresses individually! 

• ixl.com (FREE) This site has tons of topics that students can practice. A license can be purchased, or students can pay for an account, for unlimited access to this site. For free, however, everyone can practice a limited number (20) of questions per day.

The next thing that I need to check on is whether or not they are all accessible on a tablet... That's not always a given!

8 Mathematical Practices

I currently do not have any displays of the 8 mathematical practices in my room, and am trying to think of a good way to make them visible without taking up too much wall space. While I was looking for some display resources for Math 6 Common Core "I can" statements, Teach Inspire Prepare on TpT had these free mathematical practices cards. Check them out as well as the "I can" statement cards that I intend to purchase!

Divisibility

Even though divisibility rules are not mentioned in our unit plans, sixth grade math teachers have been teaching divisibility rules for a while. Here is a resource for teaching those divisibility rules that I found (of course) on teacherspayteachers.com

When I get my head wrapped around it, I fully intend on making some of my own to put on there! Promise!