We’ve got you covered! Covered with some free activities for your 5th or 6th grade classroom! I meet regularly with some other teacher authors across the United States. Our expertise ranges from teaching 4th grade all the way up to education majors at the university level. We wanted to give something back to our readers, so we created exclusive freebies just for you! Grab one or all of them based on your needs. Check out the the free resources by clicking on the picture. I make math resources for upper elementary and middle school. This math mystery is a fun activity for practicing adding & subtracting mixed numbers. Students solve clues to figure out where the missing video game controller went! It’s great as a review, extra practice, or can be left for a substitute teacher. Lynda R. Williams makes science resources. If you teach science, these no-prep ecosystem and food web worksheets will help students identify the energy flow in an ecosystem and practice other food web concepts. Ginny Priest creates science resources. This download includes 2 games, one for 5th grade and one 6th grade science students based on NGSS. The 5th grade game is great for test prep. The 6th grade game works as a fun end of the year review or to prepare for a final exam. This coloring by code activity is from Marion Piersol-Miller of Mentoring in the Middle. This activity will keep kids engaged while working on the important task of identifying figurative language. This ancient China resource is from Looking to the Past with Mary Jenkins. The resource is ready to print and teach today. Students learn about the Tibetan Plateau and Gobi Desert with a simple relief map. I hope these help with your planning and teaching this spring!
30 more days of teaching. 45 more days of math lessons are needed to get through the curriculum. I’ve been there, you’ve been there, trying to figure out how to get all the curriculum in when there’s not enough time to teach it all. It feels like a race to the finish line. Literally. Your heart is beating fast, there’s a nervousness in your stomach, and then the frustration sets in that it might not be possible. The mad rush to get everything in seems to be closing in. How can you just pick what’s most important? Your students need ALL the math skills to be ready for next year. Measurement or geometry, and in middle school, statistics, never gets the time it deserves in our curriculum, because it’s usually one of the last units. And it was probably the last unit for students last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. How to fit it all in You’re going to get to it this year! How, you might wonder? Figure out what standards you have left to teach. Since there isn’t time for extras, focus on just getting the standards in. There won’t be much time for extra practice, but there will be time to introduce the standards and teach them in a condensed way. Some knowledge of those standards is better than no knowledge at all. If you have a math book that you teach from, you’ll probably need to put that aside to get everything in. Look at the standards that you can combine and teach together in one day or a few days. Consider a project that students complete where you can provide a quick mini-lesson on the subject matter and then they practice it within the project. I have found that fun projects help students pick up on the subject matter quickly. Click here for a fun statistics project that can be completed in a day or two. Flip the classroom. Record a lesson on the material for students to watch at home for homework. When students come in, spend the time practicing the skill or skills. What a time saver! Teach the material in small chunks and then allow for practice time. I have interactive digital lessons that teach the standard and then allow for practice. The lessons can even be assigned for students to work on individually. This is a great option when some students are ready to move on to the next concept and others aren’t. You can work with the students that aren’t ready to move on and assign these lessons to those that are. Let students explore the standards on Khan Academy. The link brings you to Grade 4, but you can click on the left side for the specific grade and standard you need. There are quick video mini-lessons and questions to use as practice. Even better, the questions check themselves, so students get immediate feedback. However you decide to get those last standards in, you’ve got this! You are in the home stretch. Summer break is on the horizon. And you will be able to leave with the satisfaction of getting through your math curriculum.
It’s Saturday night. I hear the giggles of the kids and the faint voices of my husband and our neighbor out at the bonfire. I’d love to be part of the fun, but I’m slumped on the couch, with piles and piles of ungraded papers scattered everywhere, again. My kids are busy making memories without me, again. But the students completed the work, so I must check it, right? WRONG! Destroy that belief. Determine Your Purpose of the Assignment to Determine How to Grade Math homework is meant for practice. Mistakes show up in practice. Don’t punish the kids for muddling through a new concept. Show them their persistence and learning is the goal. Give credit for completion. If you must grade the homework, choose 3-5 problems, correct those, but skip the grade so you provide feedback, but students aren’t punished with a poor grade for making mistakes when they’re learning something new. If the purpose of reading group work is for students to think about the chapters they read and be ready for discussion during reading groups, grade it for completion, but not content. Here’s a quick tip when grading for completion…don’t get those papers into your hands. Don’t even touch them. You do NOT need another stack of 35 papers paperclipped and taking up prime real estate on top of your desk. If you’re grading for completion, walk around and glance to see if the homework is complete. I walk around with a checklist. I mark the absent students for the day on the checklist and then ONLY mark the students that DIDN’T complete the work to save on time. During bell work or when students are working on something else is the best time to do this. Bonus! By not collecting papers, I don’t waste time passing back the papers, either! Do you need to see if your students understood a concept and are ready to move on? How about a quick formative assessment that can be graded in a few minutes? And by graded, I mean separated in a “they get it” pile or a “they don’t get it” pile. Assign Work that Doesn’t Require A Lot of Checking Time A form that checks itself, yes please! Remember the old scantrons that teachers used to correct tests in seconds? If you don’t, then you’re way younger than I am! Google™ Forms are the scantrons of today. With so many schools providing a device for each student, jump into assigning Google™ forms to save time from checking homework. There’s also assignments that are self-grading. With my math mazes, students can usually determine they’ve made a mistake while working because they need a correct answer to move to the next problem. There’s nothing better than immediate feedback! If you collect and grade them, just glance at the squares students have colored in. Check out my mazes for math concepts in 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grade here. Another option is self-checking math task cards created by my friend Mary Jenkins. These also give immediate feedback! Check them out here. Check Work While Students are Working Spot check as students work. Move around the room and circle the number of the question if it’s incorrect. Students go back and rework it or ask a question if they don’t understand. Find an open desk when students are working quietly. Sit there and correct papers. I liked to be in close proximity to my students as they were working. Just don’t get mistaken as a student as I often did! Let Students Take on the Task of Checking Papers Grade as a class. Students correct their own work to take responsibility for their learning. I did this on a regular basis. Students had the feedback they needed on how they were doing, and I the work didn’t pass through my hands. Side note for this…I know many teachers that complain that some students change their answers when the answer was wrong. Don’t take this the wrong way, but so what? I’m not giving the assignment a grade. I want them to know if they’re consistently getting the answers wrong, meaning they need more work on that concept, or if they’re consistently getting them right, meaning they know they’re close to mastery. If they change their answer, they know they got it wrong, don’t they? Do you have stations or centers? Make a work checking station. Students correct their work with the answer key. If it’s something that you want to see how they did, have them turn it in after they check it. If not, students can put it in their take-home folders right away. Vary work-checking practices. This ensures your students don’t just write random answers to show work is “complete”. If your students are unsure when you’ll check for correctness, they are more likely to put effort in on all assignments. As for me, scaling back on checking papers led to time out at the bonfire with my kids and husband. There’s nothing better than a fire so hot you have to move back in your chair, and ooey-gooey marshmallows in S’mores. So what are you going to do with your extra time on the weekend? Looking for More? Are you wondering how to grade Interactive Notebooks? Check out my friend, Lynda’s blog post on that here. Here’s a hint…she suggests you do not grade every page! Here’s my friend Ginny’s blog post on grading notebooks, including a free rubric!
You’ve just started your unit on adding and subtracting fractions by mentioning equivalent fractions to your class. Instead of students nodding in understanding, wide and confused eyes stare back at you. Glancing at the class, all but a few of your students are acting as if equivalent fractions are foreign words that they’ve never heard before. The lack of knowledge is going to put you days behind in your lessons, but you can’t skip right to adding and subtracting with unlike denominators until your students have a firm grasp on equivalent fractions. Scratching your lesson for the day, you switch gears to spend the time teaching equivalent fractions. But what is the best way to teach equivalent fractions…and fast? I’ve been freshly reacquainted to the fun of teaching fractions to a 5th grader this year. My youngest child is currently in 5th grade. She came home with that wonderful, exciting fraction homework one day. Crying in frustration (yes, her and me), I quickly realized that she had little to no understanding of equivalent fractions…thanks, Pandemic. There was no way I could work with her on finding a common denominator and then equivalent fractions without first backing up and teaching her equivalent fractions. Luckily, I had a trick up my sleeve, and some resources that I had already created that I could use to give her a crash course on finding equivalent fractions. The Quick Tip-“The Big One” Start with modeling, move to using “The Big One”, and put that knowledge to use on basic problems. So what is “The Big One”? Start teaching equivalent fractions by asking students what 4 × 1 is, then what 5 × 1 is, and so on. The students will usually point out how easy that is, which is exactly what I want them to do because finding equivalent fractions is the same as multiplying by one. This is where “The Big One” comes into play. Point out that the word equivalent means equal, so we are finding equal fractions (fractions that if modeled with a fraction bar would have the exact same amount shaded, assuming the fraction bars are the same size. The only difference is the number of pieces each fraction bar has in it). Carefully explain how to find equivalent fractions. NEVER say that we are multiplying the fraction by 2 or by 3, because that is not what we are doing. We are always multiplying the fraction by 1, “The Big One” to find an equivalent fraction. Take a look at the problem in the picture below: In this problem, “The Big One” is 3/3. Make a big deal of explaining that 3/3 means the same thing as 3 divided by 3, which equals one. Have Some Fun to Solidify the Learning Let the students come up with other fractions that can be written in “The Big One”. They love to come up with fractions like 1,672/1,672. Let them do this. Let them get silly with huge numbers that still will equal 1. By allowing them the silliness, you are solidifying the understanding of “The Big One” in their minds. Draw “The Big One” over the fraction that you are multiplying by so that students visually remember that they need to multiply by 1 each and every time they are finding an equivalent fraction. Have students draw “The Big One” on all the problems they complete, and with their homework. Some students will end up drawing “The Big One” all year when dealing with equivalent fractions. Others will grasp the concept quickly and move away from it. If you’re interested in the activity pictured, you can find it here. And if you’re wondering how things turned out between my daughter and me after that fraction homework, I can happily report that she did very well on the homework and the fraction unit too. She came home with a big smile and a big A on her test on fractions. I’d say that’s a win!! Now onto decimals! Additional Equivalent Fractions Resources Some students just need lots of visual practice with finding equivalent fractions. If you have some students like that, here’s an interactive activity that students can mostly complete on their own. Find that activity here. If you’re a 5th grade teacher and also want a resource that is beneficial for practice with finding common denominators and adding and subtracting fractions and mixed number with unlike denominators, you can find that here.
I had one student who hated coming to math class. I knew if we stayed on this path the entire year, neither one of us would enjoy the year. So I changed my approach. Before long, she was asking questions, staying after class for my help, and beaming with a newfound sense of accomplishment when it came to her homework. She even told me, “You’re my favorite teacher!” and “I love math.” How did things change so drastically? I worked on my relationship with her, and I showed her I cared about HER. Here are 5 ways to develop positive relationships with your students. #1 Do what you say you’re going to do to develop a positive relationship One way to develop positive relationships is letting students know that they can count on you. If you say you’re going to do something, follow through on it. This helps build trust. In my classroom, my students knew that I was going to follow through, especially when it came to discipline. I let them know when I would call home to speak with a parent, and I followed through. Or if I said that we would have an extra 10 minutes at the end of the day for free time if the students focused and got everything done that we needed to, I made sure they got the 10 minutes, and sometimes would give them a few more. For many students, they’ve unfortunately learned that people will often say one thing and do another. Don’t let them learn that from you. #2 Apologize when you make a mistake Teachers are human. It’s ok to make a mistake, but to keep a positive relationship or continue to work towards a positive relationship, we must admit when when we’ve made a mistake. As adults, modeling what should happen when we make a mistake is a valuable learning moment for students. I remember a situation where I was short with a few of my students regarding a situation with another student. I was stressed out that day and should not have been short with them. After the situation occurred, I pulled the 3 students aside and apologized to them. They were appreciative that I took the time to apologize to them. By modeling for our students what to do when we make a mistake, we show them how to respond when they make a mistake. #3 Talk to students about things that have nothing to do with academics Learn about your student. Find out the student’s likes and dislikes, and what the student enjoys doing outside of school. Bring up those things that you’ve learned about your students throughout the year. I had a student that lived for baseball. My boys do too. I regularly talked to the student about how his baseball team was doing, when games were, and how practice was going. This is what was important to him and it helped create a relationship. Other teachers sometimes had a difficult time with him behaviorally, but I never did and I’m sure it’s because of our relationship. Another student loved to watch movies. He went to the movies with his family almost every weekend. At the end of the day, he loved to tell me about the latest movie he saw, especially since I didn’t like scary movies and those were the ones he usually saw. He loved to watch me cringe! #4 Help students share their gifts with the class Not every student is going to excel at academics. However, those students that don’t excel at academics excel at something else. Find out what that something else is and incorporate it into the classroom as much as possible. One of my students didn’t excel at academics, but he was an amazing artist. When creating bulletin boards, I had him create artwork that went along with it. He was so excited to show his parents his artwork adorning my bulletin boards when his parents came into the room for conferences. #5 Celebrate each individual I love sending positive postcards home to parents, or calling or emailing them. All students are amazing and special and deserve to have their teacher say something positive about them. Parents love it when I call them just to tell them how great their child is. While unexpected, it makes a huge difference in developing positive relationships with your students (and parents!). Here is a freebie to easily send a positive note home with your student. Teaching is a lot of work, but the school year will be much smoother when you develop positive relationships with your students!
Back to school time is quickly approaching! Now is a great time to start preparing for the start of the school year! The First Week of the School Year is All About Routines & Relationships I remember my very first year teaching, back in 2000. I was so excited to finally have my own classroom. My first job was as a 4th grade teacher, which is the same grade I had done my student teaching in, so I probably felt a little more confident than I should have. As I sat down to write my plans for the first day and week of school, I froze. I had no idea how to start the school year. Knowing I couldn’t just jump into math and reading lessons, I was truly at a loss for what I needed to do. I marched down to my mentor’s office, feeling overwhelmed and a bit defeated. Thankfully, she handed me her lesson plan book from the last year she had taught. I held onto that gift and read through it like it was the holy grail of teaching. The very first day of school, needs to be spent on developing relationships with the students and establishing the routines that you want them to follow for the entire year. The first moments are critical with your new students. Stand outside of your classroom as they are entering for the first time. Have conversations with them, find out their names, introduce yourself. Make sure you have a huge smile on your face that welcomes them back to the new school year. In fact, making a habit of greeting your students at the door on a daily basis throughout the year, is a great habit to form. This helps to start a positive relationship between you and each of your students. As students enter the classroom, they will need direction of what you want them to do, such as finding their seats, getting started on an activity (click here to grab a free getting to know you activity in my resource library), and putting away their things. Whatever it is that you want them to do, make sure that it will keep them busy for a set amount of time and make sure students know what to do if they finish early (such as read quietly, label their belongings, draw a picture, etc.). I always write the directions on the board so that they know exactly what to do when they enter the classroom. After taking attendance, I often let students get to know me through a little true & false guessing game about myself. They always have fun with this! Practicing routines is usually up next. You must take the time to model and practice expected routines and procedures. This will help make the school year go so much smoother! Practice, practice, practice! I get my students up and moving and practicing throughout the first week of school, and throughout the year whenever they seem to be getting a little lax on the routine. Routines to Practice When You Start the School Year We discuss and practice routines throughout the week for: The attention getter, and expectations when the attention getter is used (lots of practice is needed with this one!) What to do when entering the classroom in the morning Where to keep belongings How attendance is taken How to walk in the hallways (we practice this LOTS!) When it is appropriate to ask to use the bathroom When it’s a good time to sharpen a pencil, and how to get back to their seat after using the pencil sharpener What to do if they don’t have a necessary supply Where community supplies are kept and how to use them The location of calculators, the check-out process and when they can be used Where to put completed assignments Where to place notes for the office and notes for me How to line up How to get ready for lunch Expectations for group work What to work on when finished with work How to check out books from your classroom library if you have one How to head their papers (Do you want the date? Subject? Hour?) Where to get assignments from when they’re absent The location of extra copies of assignments How you will dismiss them from class What areas of the classroom are off-limits (such as behind your teacher’s desk, storage cabinets, etc.) When you have 10, 20, 30 or more people working together in one room, procedures are essential! Sometimes you don’t know you need a procedure for something until you are in the midst of it and realize that what is being done is not efficient or working. It’s ok to create and practice a procedure on the spot! Develop Relationships with Your Students as You Start the School Year Getting to know your students, such as what their likes and dislikes are, what their home life is like, how they handle successes and failures, what they do when they’re frustrated, if they feel comfortable asking questions, are all things that will help you to establish a relationship with each of your students. Each and every one of your students deserves your attention, your care, and your compassion. Some students are easier to love than others, but the ones that can sometimes be difficult to love are the ones that need your love and care the most. The more time you spend talking to your students and observing your students, the better relationship you can cultivate. In the first week of school that means completing activities that give insight into your students’ lives. One activity I completed every year was the Fish Bulletin Board activity. This activity was fun for my students, allowed students to see their similarities and differences, helped decorate a bulletin board and gave me some information about my students. I always do a lot of observing while they are working on the fish, because it helps me see which
It was Friday night. I could either head out for date night with my husband, get a head-start on that new series I wanted to watch, or curl up in my bed for the night at 5pm. Every Friday night, I was choosing to curl up in my bed and go to sleep. I was just too exhausted from the never-ending demands of teaching to do anything else. One of the most difficult things that teachers deal with is burn-out. We often give absolutely everything we have to being a teacher. We give 100% and then some. But is that really the best? Is there a way to have a work-life balance and still be the absolute best teacher you can be? The answer is yes, and the answer always needs to be yes. If you become burned out, you can’t be a great teacher. You must take care of yourself and your own family to be the best for your students. Leave work at school First, leave your school bag at school. Yes, that’s where it belongs. I’m not sure where or when it became standard that teachers were supposed to always bring work home with them. I know that there are papers to check, and lessons plans to write. Can you stay at school an hour longer to get those things done? You’ll probably get it done a lot quicker at school than at home anyway. Don’t bring work home with you. I used to bring my school bag home with me every single day. And every single day I felt guilty if I didn’t open it, but instead tended to my little ones and their needs. That guilt was unnecessary. The time I had with my young children was precious and should never have been associated with a feeling of guilt because I didn’t do work during my time at home. I eventually realized what was happening and stopped bringing my school bag of papers home with me. Instead, I did my absolute best to use my time wisely when I was at work. When I did bring my bag home with me, it was very seldom, and only when absolutely necessary. I know many of you are probably thinking right now, I can’t leave my work at school. I have way too much to get done! If there is something required to be completed by a certain time and admin is giving that deadline, bring it home and get it done quickly. But if that’s not the case, it might be time to start reevaluating what you are doing and how you are doing it. Be picky about what you grade I started realizing that I didn’t have to completely check every single assignment. Letting my students grade some their work or spot checking a few problems instead of the whole page saved me tons of time. Also, I started really considering the assignments that I was giving to my students and if those assignments were necessary or if they could be shortened or done in a different way that wouldn’t require me to check them. For example, for math homework, I provided parents with an answer key for the homework. It even showed step by step how to complete each problem. Parents were extremely thankful for this because it allowed them to help their children with the homework. I know that many are thinking about this leading to cheating, and could it? Absolutely. But listen, the kids that weren’t going to do the homework anyway are usually the ones that would copy the work, but at least they were copying the work down, which led to some of them grasping more than if they didn’t complete the homework at all. Plus, as a teacher, you know spent the time working on it and now have an understanding of the material and those that didn’t. Be present While the school bag may stay at school, sometimes it’s hard to leave work thoughts at work. This was a huge struggle for me. I used to be involved with my family, but my mind kept wandering back to thoughts that had to do with work. I would spend home time thinking about school and school time thinking about home. It was this vicious cycle that didn’t give me the opportunity to enjoy either. I had to learn the art of being present. This is not something that happens immediately. I couldn’t just flip a switch and it magically happened. I had to work at it. One thing that helped me be more present as home was using my commute to decompress. I processed my day on my commute. Once I had the chance to do that, to think about how the day went, how I handled things, what things worked well and what didn’t, it helped me to push those work thoughts out of my head when I got home. I turned the radio off to do this so that I could be present in those thoughts. Doing so allowed me to be present for those who deserved my undivided attention when I got home-my little ones and my husband. Another way to leave work thoughts at work is not to check work email while at home. Or if you absolutely must, set aside a specific time to do so that doesn’t conflict with family time. If you have notifications on your phone alerting you to work emails, turn them off. This small adjustment can help tremendously to avoid teacher burn-out. Combat teacher exhaustion ahead of time There is no other exhaustion like teacher exhaustion. And as the year goes on, that teacher exhaustion typically gets worse. And as teacher exhaustion gets worse, so does a teacher’s patience and level of teacher burn-out. There’s not a ton that can be done to combat teacher exhaustion, because by the end of the school year it’s almost inevitable, but I have found a few fixes to prevent teacher burn-out.
So many teachers are choosing or are currently being faced with virtual teaching. Many teachers are doing so in the comfort of their own home. The classroom is now a teacher’s living room. The teacher’s lounge is now the kitchen. The lines between school and home were often blurred for teachers before because of bringing papers home to check, bringing lesson plans home to write and bringing the emotional baggage from the day home as well. Those lines are being blurred even more as many teachers complete all their work at home. So now, more than ever, it is essential that you figure out a way to keep home and work separate. There must be some line between the two, otherwise that line that was already blurred will disappear altogether. Here are some tips, on keeping work and home separate: Find a designated workspace. If you have an office or den in your house, that would be the ideal place. Only do your work in that one area. Don’t work in your bed, on the couch or at the kitchen table if you have an area that you can designate as your workplace. Your mind will then be able to shift into work mode when you are in the designated area, and still be able to be in home mode when you are no longer in that area. If you don’t have a place that you can designate as a workspace, try to pick ONE place in your home where you will work. If you have to work on the couch, pick the same place to always sit to do work and when you aren’t working, don’t sit in that place. Set a work schedule. Try not to deviate from that schedule. I do my work, for the most part, during the day. I reserve the evening for my time with my family. Setting my schedule has really helped me switch efficiently between work life and home life. It allows me to focus on my family and my work. I can sometimes be a workaholic, so I found that this was essential in my balance of work-home life. I needed to be able to tell myself that it was ok to step away from work and not feel guilty about it. You may be the opposite and instead, your family takes up all the time and you have a difficult time shifting away from family time to do your work. Either way, setting a schedule helps define the openness of your day when working at home. Limit distractions. Limit work distractions during home time and limit home distractions during work time. During work time there are several home distractions you need to prepare for, such as notifications from your personal email, social media on your phone, or family members that want your attention. During family time, you need to prepare for work email notifications or phone calls. You need to decide ahead of time how to handle these distractions when they occur. Get ready for your day! Get showered and dressed as if you were actually going into work. Working in your pjs can further blur the line between home and work life. If you wake up each morning and get ready as if you were going into your classroom, your brain gets into work mode. If you stay in your pjs, you may struggle to get focused while working and then your association of getting into your pjs to relax may no longer occur. I don’t leave my bedroom in the morning until I’ve made my bed, showered, and dressed for my day. However, there are days where I will skip my make-up routine! Decompress. Set aside a short amount of time to decompress at the end of your work day. Usually, when you leave school for the day, you have a commute home that allows you to unwind. You need the same thing at the end of your day when working at home. I suggest a few minutes of mediation or silence, listening to some music, or maybe a few minutes to call a fellow teacher and chat like you would outside your classrooms at the end of a school day. This will allow your brain to decompress from the work day and shift into your home life time. If you follow these tips, you should see clearer division between your work day and your home and family time. Do you have additional tips that have helped while working at home? If so, comment below!
“I can’t do this. I’m not good at math. I’ve never been good at math.” One of the most challenging issues we face as teachers of math is students coming into the classroom already having a preconceived notion about their ability as math students. So many students walk into our classroom that first day and already feel anxious or beat-down because they feel they are not good at math or not a “math person”. This idea may have stemmed from feelings in math class in previous grades or even from home. When a student hears parents or caregivers claiming they just never understood math or aren’t a math person, the student may internalize that message and feel the same way. So what is a math teacher to do to combat those feelings that some students have? First, you must work on building community in the classroom to make your math class welcoming. Share a story with your students to build community in the classroom. Make it a math story. Can you think of a time when you struggled with math and overcame that struggle? That is a perfect story to tell your students. I always share with my students the time when I needed a math tutor. I had some struggles going on in my life and wasn’t focusing very well during math class. Completing the work became impossible for me because I didn’t know how to do it. My parents got me a math tutor to help out. While I had quite a bit that I needed to work on to get caught up, I eventually caught up and then no longer needed the math tutor. Sharing this story with my students makes them see me as a real person. They realize that just because I am a math teacher, math doesn’t always come easy to me. It helps my students realize the importance of paying attention during math class. It also shows them that getting extra help to understand something isn’t a bad thing. If you don’t have a specific math story you feel you can share with the students, share any story you have of a time that you have struggled with something and overcome it. The more stories and examples your students have of overcoming challenges the better! Allow your students to share their stories as well. Creating a safe, supportive math classroom helps build community. Help students identify their feelings. Many students don’t realize what’s holding them back in math is their own thoughts, which is why it is so important that students identify them. Have students complete a math survey within the first few weeks of school to identify their feelings about math. You can create your own survey, or grab my free math survey. This survey not only helps students identify their thoughts about math, but it also helps you identify the students that will need work on their mindset. Incorporating activities surrounding a growth mindset in your classroom with help students see that they can be successful in math and again. Help them understand that people aren’t good at math simply because they are born that way. Anyone can be successful at anything with effort, practice, determination and perseverance. Helping students change their thinking helps strengthen your math classroom community. Reward students for their perseverance and determination. A big struggle with teaching a large number of students is the expectation that students will all learn the concepts at the same time. Your time is limited in the classroom, so after you’ve taken a test, you have to move onto the next concept. However, what if some of the students haven’t grasped the concepts that you just tested on? This is a common occurrence. Continuing to incorporate previous concepts into warm-ups and discussion is important, but helping students see the importance of their own continued learning is equally important. Your job as a teacher is not just to teach, but to ensure that students have learned. That’s why I allow students to retake tests and redo assignments for more credit. I know that there is much debate about this practice on both sides, but I have found that it is what aligns best with my values and beliefs as a teacher. Rewarding students who continue to persevere and are determined to improve is a simple way to show students that you believe in them and their abilities. This also helps create an emotionally-safe classroom because students won’t feel the pressure (and sometimes anxiety) of needing to be perfect on the first try. Do you have another way to help our students become confident, happy math students? Share it in the comments for others!
