Teacher Created Materials

The holidays are such a crazy time of year, especially in the classroom. Students are filled with excitement and anticipation, and it’s not easy to manage both your classroom and your own holiday to-do list. That’s why when the bell rings on the last day of school for the year, it's important to relax and unwind so that you return from break refreshed and ready to hit the ground running in January.

As classroom teachers we spend hours setting up our physical classroom environment and spend weeks building a community of learners, so now is the time to really reflect on the things that we say as teachers that will benefit our student’s mathematical conversations. If you choose one or two of these Teacher Discourse Moves to focus on for the next few weeks, you will see your students begin to engage in deeper mathematical conversations, arguments and begin to ask questions of each other.

The very best teachers we ever had as students involved us in the learning process. They drew us in and got us making our own connections to what they were teaching. They may have also created a sense of cognitive dissonance, or mental discomfort, that we wanted to resolve. Creating an environment of active learning that engages students promotes deeper understanding and long-term retention of the concepts we are teaching.

Clothesline Math is nicknamed the master number sense maker because it requires students to think harder about quantities while simultaneously making it easier to see their relationships to each other. To create this tool in your classroom, simply hang a long string—like a clothesline—somewhere that all students can see and interact easily with. The numbers for the clothesline are created by folding paper or index cards in half and writing the numbers on the front. They can be integers, fracti

In honor of National STEM Day, we are sharing this mini lesson as a way to support students during the design process. Allowing students the opportunity to give and receive feedback from others enables them to assume greater ownership of their work and provides students with a valuable skill for lifelong learning. During any kind of activity or project, friendly feedback can be given. This is especially true for design projects, where students can help peers improve their ideas, designs, and mod

During my first years of teaching, one particular evaluation has stuck in my head all of these years. It ended with one word from my principal, “Closure?” It suddenly became glaringly obvious to me that too many of my lessons ended with the bell ringing. Ugh…not exactly best practice to say the least. Since then I’ve tried out lots of ideas and have come up with some “go-to” ideas that I now use to end ANY lesson.