Tomorrow is open house for me, which means it has been crunch time in getting my classroom ready to go. It shouldn't have been that difficult, because I decided to keep the same look from last year. I still really liked the bright colors, and to be quite honest, I didn't feel
Teaching Math Workshop Procedures
For your math workshop or guided math class to run smoothly, it is essential to explicitly teach your students the procedures you will use within your math instruction. However, before you begin teaching content area procedures, I recommend teaching general classroom procedures
Planning For The Year
One of the questions I'm most frequently asked is about planning for the school year. That's a big question without a quick or easy answer. It depends on the situation you're in at the moment.
Planning For New Teachers
Don't rush out and try to do all the things. It's not
Organizing Math Manipulatives
I've always tried to use my time with my students as efficiently as possible. Any random moment of down time is usually when I see student misbehavior, and I feel like I'm losing out on valuable instruction time. I'm always looking for ways to streamline procedures to keep my day
Math Work Stations
Several years ago, I would have considered myself to be an anti-centers teacher. I liked the idea of them, but I could not make them work in my classroom. I tried really hard my first couple of years teaching, but they added so much work for me, and I wasn't confident that my
Implementing and Organizing RTI
In my school, classroom teachers are responsible for RTI interventions and progress monitoring for their Tier 2 students, and we have a couple different programs that we use for reading. However, for math we pretty much have to come up with our own resources. I've found resources
Teaching After Testing
By the time we finish testing, I've taught all, or most, of the standards, so I have a little more flexibility than normal. I certainly don't want student learning to stop, but it keeping our momentum can be a challenge.
As the school year winds down, it's beneficial to both
How to Organize Math Centers
In this post I've shared how to organize math centers to help you save time and keep organized. Centers can be a great addition to the classroom, but it's not always easy to organize your center activities. And then once they're organized, it can be a challenge to KEEP them that
Classroom Management Strategies
Classroom management strategies has to be one of the most important, and often challenging, parts of teaching. I substituted while I was in college, so I quickly learned that if I wanted to survive as a teacher, I needed to learn how to manage a classroom. My first group was by
