Low Floor High Ceiling High Cognitive Demand Activities
How to make every activity a low floor high ceiling high cognitive demand activity
Finding Joy in Math: A Teacher’s Perspective
When I tell people that joy is at the heart of my math classroom, they sometimes give me a puzzled look. Math and joy aren’t often words we hear in the same sentence. But when I read through my students’ reflections this semester, one word kept coming up over and over again: joy.
Reimagining Math Class: How Antiracist Practices Are Changing the Game for Students of Color
By Matthew Rector If you’ve ever looked around your math classroom and wondered why some students seem to disengage the moment numbers appear, you’re not alone. For many students—especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and communities of color—math often feels like a wall rather than a bridge. But what if we could change that? In
Do Animal Emoji’s Help More Kids Learn More Math?
In my never ending quest to create a better math program that helps more kids learn more math I created the Animal Emoji system at the end of last year. Now that we have completed a quarter of the new school year I thought that it was a good time to assess how it’s going
Conundrums: Non Curricular Bell Work
Conundrums: Non Curricular Bell Work Are you ready to start your class with Bell Work that activates student thinking, builds connections and student confidence? Then give these a try! Assign them through Google Classroom and they’ll auto grade as long as students click on the affirmation. Here’s how I do it: I put the video
Team Building Tuesday: Getting Started
(5-min Non-curricular tasks that motivate, activate and engage Math students) If you want to read the research on why these are effective go here ENTHUSIASM MATTERS – There is enough info in each slide for students to figure it out. Start the timer and say “Go!”. Use your words to encourage them to persevere and
Mindset Monday, Teaching Math
Why Math?
According to Wikipedia, “Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes.” Other sources have similar definitions but I would like to pose a different perspective. I think that what most people think of
Teaching Math
Is “Building Thinking Classrooms” Grouping right???
As a math teacher I am constantly reevaluating my program because even if we think everything is perfect our group of kids change every year and what might have been great for last year’s group might not be so for this one. One of the parts of my program that I thought I’d revisit this
Introducing Students to the Three Read
I developed the three read (self) assessment system prior to COVID and as great as it turned out to be at helping students take ownership of their learning and become awesome problem solvers it always took longer than I wanted for them to understand and truly embrace the system. This year I wanted to shorten
It’s All About the Dog
Meet Rufus, a super light stuffed dog that we use to decide who reads or answers a question next. How does an inanimate stuffed dog choose students you might ask? Well, using a complex AI generated algorithm I created a… Only kidding!!! As much of a techno geek as I am, I have come to