Organizing Math Materials: Math Tub Signs

Oh yes, I can relate! Does this sign speak to you?   I know I've been there and have felt that. 

Some teacher friends and I were talking about what kinds of things "steal our peace" in the classroom.

Disorganization ranked high on the list.  I have often felt as though I was drowning in the classroom clutter; it can overtake my space and overwhelm my mind. 

A few years ago I took part in a 30 Bags in 30 Days New Years Challenge.  The purpose was to decrease stress and regain peace by unloading one bag of unnecessary stuff from our homes each day for the month of January. I wanted my home to  be a refuge; a place to play, create, dream, rest and love my family.  It is hard to achieve that when too much clutter overtakes our space. 

 Our group used Peter Walsh's book, It's All Too Much as our guide.  This is a super easy read and helped lead me to the realization that having more possessions was more suffocating than liberating. Too much stuff wasn't helping me to live the kind of life I wanted for my family..it was getting in the way. Through this challenge I have discovered a simple and decluttered home helps me to stay focused and centered on what is important in my life. 

So now it's time to translate this thinking into my classroom.  Has too much stuff overtaken your school space? In his book, Peter Walsh starts with having his readers imagine their ideal day.  Many of us spend over nine hours in our classrooms a day. What do we want that time to feel like for ourselves and for our students?  I want my kids to feel happy and energized and ready to work and learn with clear and focused minds.  I find that my kids can become overstimulated by the sheer volume of stuff in my classroom. 

This has led me on a quest to organize and declutter my files, games, books, and learning materials. I've begun streamlining my math center resources and am feeling really good about it. 

I have organized my materials by math strands and have picked only 3 or 4 games or activities to use when teaching a math concept. This has been hard because there are so many cute and fun games out there, but I've found that too many choices can result in confusion and misunderstanding. Less is best for me and my kids. 

I have designated a math area in my room and have organized my center games in these drawer sets I found in Target.  Inside each drawer are the games I have found that are the MOST engaging and appropriate for my group.  

I blogged about this organizational system last year and am back to report that it worked well and helps to keep me and my students organized and focused.   I have had many requests for the signs that I used to label each drawer. I have added them to my Teachers Pay Teachers store as a free item.

If you are interested in using them in your classroom, head here to download.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Guided-Math-Game-Tubs-Signs-1360092

There are lots of other ways to organize the stuff needed to do our jobs. 

Do you have an idea to share? 

youngdor8@gmail.com

"Let's Be Dirt Detectives" A Teaching File

 Calvin always makes me smile. 

 Do you use comics with your kids? In his book, The Highly Engaged Classroom, Robert Marzano highlights the benefits of using humor as a way to capture students' attention.  I will often throw a comic up on the smartboard as the "hook" for a lesson. I've got to agree with Marzano...show them something funny or silly and they are a captive audience. I've used this particular comic strip  before during our science unit on Soil.  Comics like this one are also good exercises in thinking and making inferences.  Students need to be able to study each picture and figure out what Calvin is doing and why. Then of course they need to understand what the word "avoid" means to get the humor in it all. 

Comics may be short in length but often are big in learning opportunities. 

So, I am slowly but surely finishing up the Soil Studies Unit and have added an investigation on Erosion. 

In this study students learn what erosion is and how we can prevent it.

We prepared two pans of soil.  One was a hill of bare soil and the other was a soil hill that included grass.

Students made it "rain" by pouring water over both hills.  Through their observation they were able to conclude that much less soil was lost on the grass filled hill when compared to the bare hill. 

Students recorded their observations with both words and pictures. 

This experiment is just one of a set that I LOVE doing with my students as we study soil. 

Students take on the role of "dirt detectives" as we dig up all there is to know about this topic.

The set below includes all the student lab reports.  We go through the scientific method of Question, Hypothesis, Procedure, Observation and Conclusion with each one we do. 

I've made this bundle available on TPT if you are interested. 

Click the link below if you are interested in grabbing it to use with your students. 

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/A-Soil-Study-Unit-Experiments-and-Investigations-1329429

Along with this I am sharing my teaching file on Soil.  I started making these slide show files for most of the social studies and science units that I teach.  It keeps me on track and kind of serves as my lesson plan sequence. They are formatted as PDF files and I display them on my Smartboard and use my Smartboard tools to highlight or write on them. They provide visuals and text that focus right on the big ideas that my students need to learn. I will go over a section at a time and then  if students have access to computers at home,  this slide show can also become part of their study guide to use in preparation for a unit test. 

Click below if you are interested in using this type of slide show as part of your instruction. 

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Soil-Teaching-Slide-Show-1346472

Let me know if you like this type of teaching tool and I will share the others I have made.

Comment or email at youngdor8@gmail.com 

Concrete Poetry: Creating Cloud Art

I am back with another great book find. This one is called Splish Splash by Joan Bransfield Graham.  I am always on the look out for books that can serve as good models or mentor texts.  This one is filled with concrete shape poems.  I want my kids to have fun with writing and language and want to give them plenty of opportunities to "play around" with words in creative ways. Isn't that what we want for our budding writers! This book opens up a whole other way of viewing poetry writing.

Take a look...

Check out these fun pages...

This one also works with alliteration through words like: clicking, clatter, clink, crazily...

I love this ocean one.  Words run like the waves in the sea.

And this Sprinkler poem - how clever!

Looking through this book reminded me how much fun my kids had working with the FREE website

Taxedo.com.  Have you all ever tried this one?  It turns words into cloud art!  So cool, and SO simple to use, I can even do it! 

We used it as we jumped into our animal research last year.  I wanted the kids to get into the habit of pulling out key words that related to the animals they were researching.  I had them skim through nonfiction animal books and to record words they thought would be important when writing about that particular animal.

Then we entered those words into Taxedo and it created this awesome animal art! Kids LOVED it and kept doing more and more - I finally had to cut them off.

There are plenty of animal shapes to choose from on Taxedo and kids can pick their font and color.

Check out some of their creations: 

Play around with it yourself..you will have fun and so will your kids!

Check out the other cloud art you can make....they have lots of other shapes besides just animals to choose from.  Watch out, once you start it is hard to stop!

/http://www.tagxedo.com/