As a K-5 international educator it’s not often that we’re discussing ways to promote safe spaces for LGBTQ members of the community. It’s almost as though it’s a taboo subject for elementary educators and you only start to see Rainbow flags appearing when students enter middle school. Where does the teaching of Diverse Family Structures…
This week, as a belated #hourofcode (which we hosted in December), the Early Years 1 classes explored BeeBots for the first time. BeeBots is basically a programmable robot where arrows and a ‘GO’ button tell the BeeBot where to move. Introductory Video from Youtube: What is it? How does it work? The class teacher decided to take…
Term 3 Panic Attack So it’s now mid-April and 3/4 of my Grade 4 students still do not know their times tables. Sure there has been some improvement since the start of the year. All of our math lessons took place in small group rotations and scaffolded ability-based instruction. Throughout the year we’ve inquired into…
Mathematical Thinking & Teaching Inspired by Marilyn Burns Re-Building 100s Chart In preparation for 2-3 digit addition/subtraction operations, it became evident early in the first week of school that grade 4s needed a major refresher of 0-100 numbers. The 1000s project completed in week 2 gave way for investigations into number patterns and number bonds…
Day 3 of school, day 2 of 1000s Project… [Continued from previous post] Today students brought in what materials they were able to collect for their 1000s project. Most remembered and one group actually went over 1000 when they counted out their flowers and leaves! ORGANIZING their MATERIALS 1) Students had the opportunity to meet…
Today we started a 3-day project called the 1000s Project… The project has been modified from the resource book by Julie Pier Brodie called “Constructing Ideas about Large Numbers” by Creative Publications. We started the lesson by watching a keynote presentation that prompted students to ask questions about the images they saw: Some comments they…
Innovative Learning in the Elementary Classroom 