Soaring Bird Mathematics

Thanksgiving break is right around the corner!

Does your school have a whole week off or just a few days before Thanksgiving? Growing up we only had Wedenday-Friday off. Same with teaching.

Once I started teaching, I realized those two days before break are some of the hardest times to plan for! Some students are absent because of travel for the Holidays. Everyone is worn down and in need of a break. By this point in the year, you are a little worn down and you have a single focus of break!

We always tried to plan review during these two days, so any students who were absent wouldn’t miss anything and to give everyone a break from new curriculum.

We aimed to keep it content related, but a little more relaxed.

This year I designed 4 quick Thanksgiving Themed Math Review items to share to use during the time before break when you just need a break!

Choice Board – 9 different Thanksgiving Themed tasks for students to complete. They can work independently or with a partner to work through the tasks.

Real World Problems– Multiplying whole numbers, decimals and fractions real world problems that are all Thanksgiving themed. They are set up in a worksheet style or you can use them as Task Cards. By buying the bundle, you can differentiate your review! Group students based on what they need to review, or challenge them with something new!

Hopefully you can make it to Thanksgiving stress free and enjoy your holiday with friends and family!

While teaching, I found one of the best forms of professional development is sharing ideas with other teachers. You can attend conference after conference about curriculum and teaching strategies, but in order to effectively reach the students with those strategies, you have to have a good foundation and rapport in the classroom. Using Pinterest, reading blogs, and scrolling through Instagram was the way that I found most of the ideas I had to set the foundation of my classroom. Since I spent so much time gathering ideas, I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorites. Over the next couple of posts, I am going to focus on back to school activities that I loved doing, classroom organization that I found useful, and some other classroom ideas I think are worth sharing as every one gears up for back to school.

First Up: Introducing yourself and getting to know your students.

At the start of each school year, you have a fresh batch of students who don’t know and who you don’t know yet! The first few days and weeks are so important in getting to know them and setting up an environment where they feel comfortable. I always started on the first day with activities that were about them and shared things about me. My favorite activity to do to help the students get to know me was for them to tell me about myself! I put up a Powerpoint slide with pictures all about me.

I tell students the slide is all about me and they have to use what they see to tell the class about me. I have them raise their hands and say the fact about me and why they decided it was something that described me. I then explain it in a little more detail.

After we finish learning about me, I ask each student to pick one thing about themselves they would definitely pick to put on a collage about themselves. I then go around and ask each student individually to tell me their name and the one important thing about them. This helps me immediately get something to relate to with each student and allows them to get to know each other too.

If you are looking for a get to know you activity for students to do, you can have them make their own collage. They can draw things, use pictures from home, or cut items out of magazines. Another spin on it is the bag activity where students put a few items in a bag that represent them and then share their items with the class.

There are so many different activities to get to know your students, but I feel like it is more important for them to get to know you over the first couple of days. Starting off by not standing in front of them lecturing about yourself, but instead having them describe you lets them open up and really own the knowledge they are gaining about you. Having them get to know you and build a relationship with you is the first step in building the rapport necessary to have a smooth running classroom.

Back to school time has ALWAYS been my favorite time of the year. Yes, I would get a little anxious seeing the aisles of the stores transform into mazes of school supplies because it meant that my summer was coming to an end, but excitement for the year to come quickly overtook the anxiety of leaving summer behind.

My love for back to school season grew when I became a teacher. After my first year of teaching, my love for back to school season grew with the joy of shopping for supplies for my classroom. I didn’t have much else to do during the summer except plan for the next school year. I discovered that once July rolled around, I became exceptionally excited for Sunday mornings when the new ads came out for Target, Staples, and Office Depot. Office Depot had those 1 cent deals!!!! I would plan my week according to which stores to go to to buy school supplies. I always bought 5 new sets of markers, crayons, colored pencils and glue sticks for each station in my room. I was the queen of finding cheap scissors and pencils. It was a routine that brought me a lot of joy. These new school supplies were the start to all the new fun activities I had been planning all summer for the new school year.

Now that I am staying home with my son and not going back to teach, I am finding this time of the year to be the hardest part to adjust to. I had 23 first days of school and everyone was just as exciting/nerve wracking as the others. This year I have found my self perusing the back to school section at target just to see whats new and fantasizing (strange way to put it, but teachers understand) how I would use them in my classroom. I am thinking we might need a new set of markers at home this fall, or maybe just a set of new flair pens!

When I was teaching 5th grade math, we had a textbook and workbook that we were suppose to follow.  As I worked through it chapter by chapter, I discovered that it didn’t actually follow the common core standards very well.  It jumped around from topic to topic and had us teaching things that weren’t in the standards.

One of the standards it didn’t cover was 5.NF.B.4.B: finding the area of a rectangle with fractional sides.

Since our book didn’t cover this topic, it became one of the first common core standard aligned practice worksheets that I made for my students.

When we were covering this topic in class, I didn’t spend much time on it since it wasn’t in our textbook. It was something that I wanted to briefly touch on in order to make sure I hit the checkmark of covering the standard. I also couldn’t find much material on the subejct to give to my students!

I have since worked on several resoruces to help students practice this skill.

I have created two differentiated sets of practice sheets designed for students to work on indpendently.  I also have guided notes to use when introducing the topics to students.  Hopefully these resources are as useful to you as they were to me when our textbooks didn’t cover the proper standards!

FREEBIE!

In my TPT store, you can find an area of rectangle with fractional sides practice worksheet for free!  It can be used for indpendent work, quick assessment, or even homework.  It contains only fractions, no mixed numbers.

FREE Area of Rectangle with Fractional Sides

You can also find these resource in my TPT store:

Area of Rectangle with Fractional Sides

PracticeDifferentiated Practice with Mixed Numbers and Fractions

Differentiated Practice Fractional Sides Only

Hi! I am Riley, the teacher behind Soaring Bird Mathematics.

I have spent the past 4 years teaching Math and Science to 4th and 5th graders. This year I am staying home with my son and working on some curriculum development.

While teaching, I spent a lot of time searching for differentiated material to match each content standard for my students. I was always able to find something, but sometimes it was too complicated or flashy. There were days that all I needed were some practice sheets for my students to work on independently during our math stations. All of those searches led me to create a lot of practice pages of my own. I realized that there might be other teachers out there who need just the same thing: basic practice sheets to be used as quick assessments or just some independent work.

I am eager to share my resources with everyone and some of my favorite activities from when I was teaching. Planning and designing fun and engaging activities for my students was one of my favorite things about teaching and I am glad to have an outlet to continue to do that even though I am not in the classroom. I hope by sharing some of my ideas, they can be implemented in classrooms for students to enjoy.