As National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) approaches, many people gear up for an enormous leap into creative writing. November has been one of my favorite months of the year for this reason, now for almost a decade, as my tenth year of participating in this program approaches. One of the areas young (and other) writers struggle with is descriptive writing. Now that so many young people spend a huge proportion of their time in front of screens, I think the other senses get neglected, and a corresponding decrease in the ability to express sensation in words comes with that. For…
In the course of my teaching and tutoring experience, I’ve come across the fact that Americans often fall short of others in geometry1,2. Besides the fact of test scores, I see that in how difficult it is for bright high school students I tutor to grasp certain spatial concepts. In fact, I was recently tutoring one incoming tenth grader, and she was unable to visualize how many cubes were in a stack. Recently, I found these foam blocks in packs of 50 for $1.00 at Dollar Tree. I bought a bunch, and they have been so useful for my teaching…
Nearly all writers have experienced writer’s block. There are many ways to overcome it, including by using a variety of prompts. I have used Rory’s Story Cubes, which the students and I love, writing kits, and more. Today an idea came to me to make a board game with writing prompts. My students have had fun and have written good stories while playing it. Please feel free to download the game and use it as you please. You may even find a way to use it in conjunction with the story cubes. Enjoy! Update July 2012: There are now Rory’s…
Like many teachers, I am always looking for ways to economize while giving my students the highest-quality educational experience possible. Math journals are part of this experience in my classes. Rather than buying commercial journals, though, I make my own quickly and inexpensively. If you’d like to learn how to do the same, please visit this link that tells you how to do it, and also gives a few tips about using math journals in your classroom. If you have other ideas about how to use math journals, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
When I saw this book at the library, I was drawn directly to it. Why? For one thing, my post on dyscalculia and teaching math is one of my most popular posts ever. For another, I am always seeking good children’s books with mathematics themes to enhance my teaching or recommend to students. Finally, given that the theme of dyscalculia is such a hot topic, I thought I might be able to learn more about it, as I have done with books about people on the autistic spectrum, such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. So…
While I work on a lengthy blog post with a book review, here is a poem from one of my young writing students. His name is Peter (Engish name), and he is a fourth grade non-native English speaker. He and his brother were born in South Korea and lived for two years in Japan before moving to the US a few years ago. They meet with me once a week for math and English tutoring. Peter has a great sense of humor, and I am honored that he let me publish his poem here. Fight at Bed I fight at…
As the fall gets into high gear, I will be getting on the road again. If you’re in New York, try to attend NYSCATE this year and register for my session on Singapore Math on Sunday, November 20. If you can come on Saturday, I will be giving a three-hour workshop on NaNoWriMo in the classroom, which will be fun and hands on. I will also be offering six Singapore Math full-day workshops this fall, starting in October and ending in December. The schedule and links to register for those, and for the conference, are at the bottom of my…
One of my pursuits this summer, when I wasn’t as active on this blog, was writing step-by-step articles on instructables.com. Projects included everything from a camp shower enclosure to a 35-cent book weight. This type of writing, the how-to essay, is great for students to practice order words (first, next, then, finally), as well as to understand how to organize their work so it makes sense. See an example of a second-grade student’s how-to essay here.
This summer I gave a three-hour workshop on Singapore Math model drawing at the NCTM Illuminations Institute in Reston, VA. This was a fun workshop with a great group of people, and we accomplished a lot of model drawing practice and understanding. I was pleased to see recently that the workshop received a couple of mentions on the web. One is on the thinkfinity site, which is run by Verizon and which I first joined after attending ISTE 2011. The other is from one of the participants, who wrote a blog post mentioning it. If you are interested in seeing…
This post was originally published on the Patch on August 5, 2011. I was recently working with a young student who had a hard time figuring out when to add commas or periods in his writing. I had given him a worksheet made from a paragraph I wrote and from which I removed proper capitalization and end punctuation. All he had to do was rewrite the paragraph with correct periods and capitals. Even though this sounds simple, he had a hard time determining where a period should go. Instead, he sometimes added a comma instead or skipped a period entirely.…