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.
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 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!
