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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 ...