S.T.E.M. Highlights
Thursday, September 8, 2016
"Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle." -Napoleon Hill
Grade level resources will be geared towards Unit 2, since for most grades this is fast-approaching. By giving these to teachers now, we're hopeful folks will have adequate time to find places to make these come alive in classrooms.
We'll kick it off with an inspiring quote:
Grade Level Resources
KINDER: Unit 2 for Kinder brings with it shapes, shapes, and more shapes. This includes the skills of identifying, building, drawing, composing, sorting, and matching. Here is an activity that will give students practice with composing shapes using other shapes. It's best performed in parters; all students will need are their brains and shapes manipulatives. Since this is a pretty involved skill/activity, this could be done potentially on a FLEX day or as part of the independent practice for a core lesson involving shapes composition.
FIRST: First graders will continue using fluency with 10's in Unit 2, as well as more and more "join-result unknown" word problems and "total unknown" word problems with three addends. Here is a fantastic homework resource for word problems. Note: while it can be tempting to download any worksheet that is related to the content we want, always make sure that a given worksheet has the best, most conceptual question-types for students.
SECOND: For Unit 2, G2 focusses on work with ones, tens, and hundreds units, particularly around ways to compose and decompose a single hundred. To help students gain this fluency, here is a resource (scroll to bottom) that could be used in homework or as a quick drill within class. In a nutshell, students must find the missing addend that will complete an equation with a sum of 100. To accomplish this, students must think about who many more ones to make a ten, and how many more tens to make a hundred.
THIRD: Unit 2 bring a HUGE focus on representing multiplication and division equations; one tool we'll be using to do this is arrays! Here is a snapshot of a really awesome activity (self explanatory) you can do with a single deck of playing cards and some graph paper. Simply give students equations (i.e. on the white board) and have them represent this on the graph paper with arrays! Do this with both multiplication and division; this can be used either as a "may do" or a FLEX day activity.
FOURTH: Among other things, Unit 2 brings with it problems that involve conversion of units. This, this, and this are some 1-pagers on common conversions that could be a useful reference tool for students, i.e. placed inside homework packets to help students access that information until it's memorized.
FIFTH: Tired of trying to think up new word problem your students haven't seen before? Try this website as a resource for word problem practice worksheets. While this may not be the best use of class time (unless it's being given to targeted students following a small group), this COULD be a really great homework resource to give students once or twice a week for continued practice!
Shout Outs + Best Practices
Our first best-practice comes from the Kinder classroom of Ms. Amanda Pardo at Rocketship Si Se Puede. Watch the video linked below and take careful note of how Ms. Pardo connects the "how" skills (posted behind her on the board) to what she's doing in her own teacher model. Whether you teach TK or G5, this is something that should be present in any "I Do." Enjoy!
Helpful Links
Mission Control - find out about your teacher benefits, perks, staff directory, summer PD resources, etc.
Box.com - where to find you "shared resource" folders, charts and chants, etc.; also where common plans are housed
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