sutton034

Over the last few years, the enrollment at my school has continued to decline.  This led us to create several multi-age classrooms.  I had not experienced a multi-age classroom since I was an elementary student myself so I did what any professional reading junkie would do and looked up books on Amazon.  I was surprised to find that almost all the books written about multi-age classrooms were published in the early 90's.   This must have been the last time there was a big push to make classrooms multi-age.  After doing some research, I ended up purchasing Multiage Portraits  which gave me some good information to start with.  I also visited a classroom at another local school who had been doing multi-age classrooms for years and learned a great deal there. As we began doing multi-age classrooms, classroom teachers found a way for most subjects to work in a multi-age way.  The subject they were struggling the most with was math.  We ended ...

This school year has been one big long example of how life sometimes gets in the way.  Every time I feel like I have things under control again, something happens to push me back into survival mode.  I finally am fighting my way back to a semblance of normal now and one of the first I things I did to help me ensure I stay here was give my classroom a big old fashioned spring cleaning.   5 Reasons Why I Prioritize Spring Cleaning My Classroom Clear Out Clutter   Like many teachers, I have a hard time getting rid of things that might be useful someday.  I have fought back against this urge by ruthlessly pitching things I no longer use each spring.  I think this works best in the spring because I can think about whether I have used something at all this school year or if I have plans to use it in the coming weeks.  If the answer to both of those questions is no, it gets thrown away, donated or recycled.  I also get ride of anything that is ...

Last spring when I was doing the Mathematical Mindsets book study, I wrote a lot about rich mathematical tasks  that all students can access but that also keep going or growing for students who need more challenge.  Since then, I have been on a quest to add more tasks like this to my repertoire and recently I cam across one that I just have to share with the world. I first heard about Yohaku in this month's issue of  Teaching Children Mathematics .  I was sitting in a waiting room while reading about them and was instantly engaged in solving the examples offered in the magazine.  I quickly moved to their website  and was amazed at the variety of puzzles they offered to meet many different math skill levels.  I knew this was going to be my next school wide low floor, high ceiling task. A great Yohaku for beginners!   I started by introducing my second and third grade group to Yohaku puzzles and by the end of the week, I had kids from K up thr...

Living in the northeast, my students get a lot of real life experience with negative numbers every winter.  Integers don't show up in our standards until grade 6, but my students get a fair amount of exposure to them much earlier than that through real life experiences with temperature.  Here is a problem I posed to my students earlier this week on the first day of spring. I just snapped a picture of the outside temperature as it shows up in my car when I got home after school one night and then again the next morning as I was leaving.  We had quite a temperature swing and unseasonably cool weather for the first day of spring and many kids were talking about the weather that day.  I love when I get a chance to capitalize on their interest with a well timed math problem.  This problem led to some great discussions about addition strategies and integers in all the grade levels.  Many students used or thought about number lines and in the older grades we talke...