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Today is August 1st, the day teachers all over the US transition to back to school.  I myself am only about two thirds of the way through summer but there is something about the calendar changing to August that makes me feel a bit anxious and a bit excited at the same time.  The familiar flutter in my teacher heart that happens at back to school time is definitely there this week.  The new year means a fresh start, new students, new colleagues and new adventures.  I am savoring the last bit of my summer and the extra time I get to spend adventuring with my family but am also looking forward to being back in the routine of school.  I am looking forward to continuing my work on personalized learning and designing math blocks that work in multi-age settings.  I am very happy that I am feeling this way because just a few short weeks ago, my teacher heart felt very broken as I struggled with a challenging end to the school year. It has been 4 months since I last...

April is National Autism Awareness Month and today (April 2nd) is World Autism Awareness Day.  Many students and families are effected by Autism and there are many things happening all month long that you can get involved in.  For much more information about Autism Awareness Month, to read stories or share your own, check out Autism Speaks . Graphic by Audi Devon  

Earlier this week, I shared how I have been working on personalizing learning in my math classes.  This change came about because I was challenged to teach math in a multi-age setting but has led to some great discoveries that have helped me improve math instruction for all of my learners whether they are in a single grade or a multi-age setting.   Today I want to talk about math centers.  Math centers, also known as math stations, guided math , workplaces or math menu  really can help with differentiation and personalizing learning.  Despite the fact that there are many names, strategies and ways to do math centers, their central purpose is to provide students with differentiated practice so that learners are engaged and occupied, freeing the teacher up to meet with small groups and provide further targeted instruction or enrichment to those who need it. It also solves the age old question of what to do with early finishers. Math centers have long been po...

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...

A few minutes before I left for vacation, my principal came in and handed me a copy of a book he wanted all of us to read at some point.  As my vacation has been coming to an end today and I have been getting back into school mode, I opened my school bag this morning and saw the book. I picked it up a few times today and read bits and pieces and started thinking about the message in the book. The book is Who Moved My Cheese ? and apparently it is the most popular  book I have never heard of.  It is a very short book (under 100 pages) but packs a powerful message about how different folks deal with change. The story is very simple and short and is preceded by an introduction and followed by a conversation between a group of friends about how they interpret the story.  At my school, we are facing a great deal of change over the next several years and I think this book will really help us open up some conversations about the changes that are coming and how we are going ...

If you have ever read the blog Forever in First , you know what in inspirational educator Tammy McMorrow is. The good news for all of us in the education world is that she has now written a book called Gatekeepers: Let's Talk About Teaching . She is a very well read author and brings a lot of other experts into this book.  She has been a first grade teacher for over 20 years but this book is really fitting for all educators.  She writes a lot about teaching writing but the lessons learned are those that would apply to teachers of any subject at any grade level. The format of this book is short chapters based around a quote.  There are 50 chapters but they are quite short, around 300 words on average.  They can be read in any order and are great short pieces that helped me reflect on my practice and think about what is next for me.  I read the first half of the book in one sitting and then decided to slow down a bit and read a little each day.  I also did so...

Over the past few years, I have put a very high priority on keeping up with professional reading.  As my kids have gotten older, we seem to be on the go more than ever and I found my pile of to be read books growing and growing and very little reading getting done.  After discussing this with a colleague I decided what I needed to do was give audio books a try.  I signed up for Audible , got 2 free audio books and was off and running.  After my 2 free books, I decided to stay subscribed and now I can download new audio books whenever the mood strikes. I have found that teaching books specifically about math are pretty limited,but general books on education, leadership and mindset are almost all available on Audible .  The first book I listened to via Audible was Strengths Based Leadership  by Tom Rath. (He also wrote one of my FAVORITE picture books How Full is Your Bucket ?) I have been in a teacher leader position in my school since almost the beginning o...

Earlier this week, I shared this post about memorizing facts versus knowing facts from memory. In this post, I talk about how I used to think timing kids daily on multiplication facts was the backbone of my fourth grade curriculum and how my perspective has shifted over time to one where I believe kids should know their facts from memory rather than through memorization.  If you are not familiar with this idea, here is a video where Graham Fletcher  explains it better than I ever could. After re-sharing this post from last summer on my Facebook page , I received the following comment from Michelle: " While I agree that strategy is the way to go (it's the only way we teach math facts), I'm second guessing myself when it takes 15 mins to work through a 2-digit x 2-digit multiplication problem bc every 'part' (when using partial products for example)  has to be worked out using a fact strategy when kids don't know their facts well. It takes soooo long. I'm ...

In the past few years, the political make up of our schools has been changing a great deal.  The way schools are funded and the amount of local control in schools has been changing.  There has been a huge push from our state government to consolidate school districts and push some of the local control to the district level.  This has resulted in many fears from parents, teachers and community members about losing their local, small town elementary schools.  They are rightfully afraid that these schools will be closed and our children will be sent to larger regional elementary schools.  I get these fears from the perspective as a teacher who works in a small school and as a Mom who loves the small school her own kids attend.  In our school, so many wonderful things happen that the general public is not aware of.  Some parents who are well connected to the school have a pretty good idea, but I often think the community in general lacks specifics about th...

I have known a lot of teachers.  First as a student, then as colleagues and now as a parent   I have been very lucky that my children have had wonderful teachers who I absolutely treasure.  I love their school, the sense of community and the teachers willingness to go above and beyond.  I am trusting these folks with the things that are most important in my life which has really forced me to reexamine my own role as a teacher in other students' lives.  These teachers and my kids' school is such an important part of their life and their happiness there is vital to the happiness of our family. A situation recently arose where the teacher of one of my children made a decision that I did not agree with.  It was a decision that made me and my child feel unwelcome in their school.  My emotional response to this decision was dramatic and I can't remember the last time I was this upset about something.  I was in the place of the irrational parent rat...

I am loving the fall weather we have been having this week!  It gave me a chance to get outside with some special Kindergarten kids and do some play based math activities using natural materials.  It was such a nice way to spend some time outside learning together!  We started by going on a little nature walk with a few buckets and picking up some beautiful leaves, acorns and pine-cones.  Then we dumped our treasures out on the table, grabbed a few fine pointed sharpies  and got to work exploring and adding some mathematical details to our fall materials.  We started by writing numbers on leaves.  Some kids wrote numbers to 10 while others wrote some random numbers they knew.  We have been doing a lot with the 10 frame model  recently and I wanted to capitalize on this so I used some of the larger leaves to draw some 10 frames which led to a lot of ordering and matching activies.  Some kids are ready to look at addition and subtraction f...

In the past few years,  I have posted some of my favorite songs and videos about  shapes ,  counting ,  multiplication ,  coins ,  time ,  fractions ,  teen numbers ,  area and perimeter  and  addition facts .  I try to keep these posts up to date with the latest songs and videos I am using with my students.  They are a great way to get a little movement break while still working on important math concepts. These little movement breaks have been super important as we have transitioned from summer vacation back to school 5 days a week.  I forget how busy the back to school season can be and now that things are finally calming down, it is so nice to be back to sharing things with you on my blog.  This week, I have had subtraction on the brain as we have been working on subtraction in the fact range in both grades 1 & 2. We are are playing a lot of games, using the same deck of cards over and over.  When k...