Ms. K
What Will Improve American Education?
With all of the talk about reforming our schools and standards, we seem to be changing the law but just trading one set of regulations for another. I, too, hope that the common core standards and current school reform leads us to better educating children. However, I just read an interesting article that addresses the spirit of the law which seems to be missing from our educational system. This article by Margaret Spellings of The Huffington Post makes the point that our nation has managed to lead the world in cutting edge discoveries in medicine, technology, and business yet still lags behind other countries educational systems. Spellings proposes several paradigm shifts in her article. If American public schools treated parents as clients, and parents were able to move students to the schools that best suited their child, then would the educational system improve? If teachers were paid not by a scale, but by the amount of work they did and by how skilled they were, then would that improve education? Ultimately, what if competition drove our school systems and the voice of the clients, would that improve American education? If the private business sector has become great on these principals, then wouldn’t it work for American education?
My Favorite Way to Introduce Division…
My favorite way to introduce division is with Divide and Ride which is a book by Stuart Murphy. I have posted about it before, but since many of you are teaching division now or soon will be, I wanted to share some of the sheets that I have developed to go along with the book. These sheets are in varying levels of difficulty. The first one is easiest and they get slightly harder. I have used them with different grade levels. The first one I used with second graders, but most of them have been used with third grade. The first question on most of the sheets is the same because it can be easily figured out with direct modeling…but if you have all of the sheets you could easily differentiate for your students since they are similar. The last sheet incorporates a question with remainders. Feel free to download them and use them for free. Let me know if they work well for your class.
What’s a Mathnasium?
I was listening to Kim Komando (the digital goddess) on nationally syndicated talk radio today as I often do, and a word caught my ear. She mentioned a Mathnasium! I, being a math coach at my school, had to wonder what it was. So I looked up a Mathnasium on line and found out that they are franchises that teach students math like a Sylvan Learning Center. They aren’t very well known yet, and they are international. Not all states have a site. This is a franchise which may interest you if you are burned out in the classroom and have a little business capital. Since they aren’t well known yet and there aren’t many locations, now would be an ideal time to get in on this business venture.
In the Spirit of the Season…
Off topic, I don’t have any children personally, so I am always wanting to give to someone else’s children. I live on a small, quiet, dead end street with lots of children, but I don’t want to hand out candy all night on Halloween. In lieu of handing out candy, I found some adorable glittery, polka dotted treat sacks at Hobby Lobby–their Halloween items are 30% off. I have planned to stuff the sacks with candy and hand them out to the neighborhood kiddos before Halloween, so they are well endowed with candy :). I did decide to hang up my fall wreath early (about 3 weeks ago) and am wondering if I should get some pumpkins to put on the porch. A church down the street always sells some for a fundraiser…now to find a pretty ceramic pumpkin for my kitchen table.
Use This Smart Board Lesson to Instill Place Value…
I just finished making this Smart Board lesson for some first graders at school. Instead of using base ten blocks for the little firsties, we decided to use snap cubes sticks to help them master place value. I really like using these as opposed to base ten blocks at this age. Snap cubes (or unifix cubes) tend to be easier for their little hands to grab. They can always easily pull them apart and count them if they don’t trust that a stick of ten is truly a ten. Below is the simple SmartBoard lesson I made, which is available on TPT.
8 Free Math Websites for Your Classroom
1. www.math playground.com –free worksheets, math games, and interactive manipulatives
2. www.classzone.com–math games, interactive lessons, games, and math vocabulary cards
3. www.mathtv.org–interactive problem solving videos
4. www.hotmath.com–math games and learning activities
5. www.softschools.com–free worksheets and interactive games
6. www.coolmath.com–math lessons, interactive games, interactive math and art
7. www.math-play.com–free interactive games
8. www.nlvm.usu.edu–national library of virtual manipulatives
How Can Your Students Easily Generate Writing Topics?
I just spent a day in a writing workshop. Our presenter discussed Ralf Fletcher’s new book Marshfield Dreams: When I Was a Kid about his childhood memories. He described how Fletcher wrote different short stories about his childhood in this book, which would be great for mentoring students in their own writing. Since the pieces are short in Fletcher’s book, they would mirror the length of a short story that a child may write. What I especially liked about this workshop is when the presenter had us to draw a map of our childhood homes and neighborhoods with all the places that were important to us. First, the presenter showed us a map copy of Ralf Fletcher’s childhood neighborhood home which is in Marshfield Dreams so that we could see an example (great idea to model for kids as well). Then the presenter had us to put an F for fear next to a place that we thought was scary. We put an S next to a place that was secret. We put an L next to a place where we learned something or did something for the first time and so on. Then the presenter had us write a short piece using one of the places on our childhood map. I thought this was a great way to lead us into writing especially because kids like to draw pictures.
I Had to Laugh
Last week I was looking over a second grader’s shoulder–a second grader I might add who had been held back a year. He had two ten frames on his paper to build a bond (sum) of ten, which was the assignment. On one of his ten frames he had drawn three dots and on the other ten frame he had drawn four dots. Beside his two ten frames he had written the equation 3 + 4 = 10.
I said, “I’m confused. Show me how three plus four makes ten.”
He held up three fingers on one hand and four on the other hand and began to count. Starting on one hand he began counting, “four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.”
I said, “Really, three and four make ten? I’m confused. Are you sure three and four make ten?”
He promptly counted confidently again exactly the same way and arrived at the number ten. I ended up correcting his thinking, but he definitely made me smile on the inside with this misconception he had developed.
Leaving Behind No Child Left Behind
In case you haven’t heard the monumental news, Obama made a major decision in education last week. Some see this ploy as merely a political move especially since he didn’t give Congress the time to edit the current No Child Left Behind law, but nonetheless it affects the national educational landscape. His decision is giving states the choice to opt out of the No Child Left Behind law in exchange for waivers from certain aspects of NCLB. If a state chooses to opt out of NCLB (at least 45 states are expected to opt out), then they will receive flexibility with federal spending and with school improvement accountability. In order to receive this flexibility, the state must have adopted the common core standards in math and literacy, develop a test to show accountability of common core standards, and measure the performance of teachers and principals factoring in student achievement.
Surprisingly 31,737 of the 98,916 schools were labeled failing in 2009. Because this is such a large number of schools, Obama’s decision is to help the bottom 5% of schools that are failing instead of all 31,737 schools, which is an insurmountable number of schools to help. Since the change to NCLB decision was not a bipartisan effort and the House and Senate did not contribute to this effort, critics are concerned that the Secretary of Education is taking too much national control.
Want to read more? Try these links here and here.
Cute Hollywood Stars Boulevard Bulletin Board!
Brainstorming about a way to honor our proficient and advanced students from last year’s state testing, our leadership team developed the following idea. We decided to take each child’s picture and place the child on a Hollywood square with a golden star. To evoke the feeling of walking in Hollywood with the stars’ squares, we had each child hand print the square with gold paint and a golden signature. Parents, teachers, and children alike are all complimenting the wall. Everyone has been stopping to gaze at the wall and find their child, student, or themselves. We are so proud of the positive attention it is getting and the motivation it is providing. The bulletin board simply says “school’s name wall of fame”. The bulletin board has some simple stars on it and a red carpet we made from bulletin board paper. There are pictures to follow that show our final product. This would be a great way to motivate students towards any goal. 
