Educational XD XD

When I was in undergrad, I was soooo nervous about teaching math . My oh my, how that�s changed. I would teach primary math all day if I could now. I absolutely LOVE it. There are a handful of tools that I�ve found super helpful when teaching math, so today I thought I�d share with you a few of my favorite MATH ESSENTIALS! #1 � Magnetic Base Ten Pieces from Learning Resources Before I had these magnetic base ten pieces , I used to hot glue magnets to the back of my foam base ten blocks and it was a disaster. The day I got these it was like Christmas! I�ve used them a few different ways. One year, my calendar area was housed on a dry erase board, so I used these for counting the number of days in school during calendar time. #2 � Number Line, Tens Frames, and Hundreds Chart Dry Erase Boards I never knew I was missing out until I got these dry erase boards from Education by Oriental Trading. Each board is two-sided, and the part I love the most is the number ...

As a primary teacher, I LOVED math centers. I love that I can meet with small groups while all of my other students were engaged in center activities and games. However, as I'm sure many of you can relate, when I prepped my centers for each week, it became very clear to me that some of my students would NOT be capable of doing the on level center activity. Now, while you're probably thinking, just give them a different center,  I couldn't do it. Seriously, there's always one or two centers that seem to be the highlight, and other students can't WAIT until they get to play it... until they don't... because I gave them a higher or lower leveled center. AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM!   I LOVE that my students LOVE math centers, and the last thing I want to do is kill their enjoyment because they're missing out on an activity some of their friends got to do. When your friends are doing an activity that's cool, you want the chance to do it, too! So that's wh...

Hi everyone! I'm so excited to share with you one of my newest products that I've just released. Let me start with how I came up with idea. And I'll be honest -- it was not cute. No clipart. No real theme. Just pure content and high levels of thinking for the small group of kiddos I was working with. That's what's important anyway! I came up with the idea when I was working with a small group of my first graders. It was the end of the year and I wanted to make sure we were using up every second we had with valuable instruction. And let's be real... At the end of the year, it better super engaging or these kids are not going to want to have anything to do with it. So I decided to turn everything into CHALLENGES. I chose activities where if they completed it correctly, they got to "level up" and move on to the next challenge. And really... the activities were extensions of things we'd previously worked on in the year, but whatever. You tell the kids ...

I've had a few questions on how I manage a 1st/2nd split with math, and I thought I'd take a quick post to share with you! By no means do I have it all figured out... It's taken A LOT of trial and error and conversations with my coworkers. I'm thankful for the awesome people I get to work with who are invested in helping each other! My class is made up of high-level first graders and average-level second graders. My first graders are smarties. No joke. Seriously, it's been SO fun to be their teacher. They catch on to new material so quickly! They're very high readers, so differentiating for my class in reading isn't bad at all. However, math is a different story. As I'm sure many of you know, first grade and second grade math is crucial. My firsties are bright, but in no way are they ready for 2nd grade math.  My math block this year looks a bit like this: When my class was set-up, the big factor we needed to figure out was, "How the heck should we ...