End of the Year

  • End of the Year, Math

    Grab these FREE Products for 5th and 6th Grade!

    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!

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  • Classroom Tips, End of the Year, Math

    Too Much Curriculum to Teach with Summer Quickly Approaching?

    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.

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