Ninja Notes

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Engaging Lessons

How to Teach Integers With Positive and Negative Numbers

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Are you looking for ways to teach positive and negative numbers as part of your integers lessons? We spent time finding activities that can be used to teach, reinforce, practice, review and assess integers in your upper elementary classroom.

In upper elementary, we’re asked to teach positive and negative numbers. This is when we start to refer to numbers as integers, which means reframing math vocabulary for our students. Come learn how we teach integers in our upper elementary math class.

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Ways to Teach Classifying Triangles

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Are you looking for some innovative ways to help students understand classifying triangles? We've put together lessons to teach, review, practice and assess triangles in your upper elementary math class. Come check it out!

Triangles are fundamental shapes in your geometry lessons. Understanding their properties lays a strong foundation for further mathematical learning. Students need to understand measurements of side lengths and angles to classify triangles. Come learn some of the ways to teach classifying triangles in your upper elementary classroom.

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How to Teach Rounding Numbers

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Are your students needing help rounding numbers? We pulled together our best strategies so you can master rounding with your elementary students and get your math class back on track.

Rounding numbers is an important mathematical skill for everyday life. Understanding how to round whole numbers and decimals not only strengthens numeracy skills but empowers students to make informed estimations and calculations. Gone are the days of teachers being able to use the “you won’t have a calculator with your every way you go” as the excuse for learning to round numbers. Instead, students need to understand all the different uses for rounding and how it relates to estimating. Learn how we teach rounding numbers in our upper elementary classroom.

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How to Build Math Fact Fluency in Your Classroom

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Getting students to practice their times tables can be difficult. There just isn't time to practice everyday. We wanted to make students more aware of their growth, so we started practicing our math facts and then had students graph their progress. It also encouraged learning about different types of graphs. Come get our math fact fluency graphs and learn how we use these in math class to ecnourage accuracy.

With so many things to do in math class each day, it’s almost impossible to help our students build fluency in math facts because there simply isn’t enough time. Timed drills have been proven to be unsuccessful for the majority of students because rather than testing mathematical knowledge, they test how fast a student thinks or writes. So, we were looking for a way to help students practice their math fact fluency without time constraints. That’s how we came up with our math fact fluency graphs.

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How to Teach Types of Sentences and Fix Punctuation Problems

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When students understand how punctuation can change an author's intent, they get better at using the correct punctuation in their own writing. They also learn to properly express the author's intent and read properly with the correct tone. Come learn about a lesson we use to help students learn about the dfferent types of sentences in our upper elementary language arts class.

Often when the school year starts, we do a few different writing activities to get a sense of how well students can (or cannot) write. One of the things we continually see is the lack of conventions regardless of whether students write by hand or type it into a device. We found that a simple lesson around the different types of sentences changed many of the punctuation problems. Come read about the lesson and get some ideas for your classroom.

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How to Unfold Geometry: Books to Shape Your Unit

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Picture books are a great way to inspire your students in a visual way. Geometry has a lot of new vocabulary which can be challenging for students, so use books to help students learn new words and concepts. Come check out this list of geometry books and questions you can use while reading them with your upper elementary students.

Are you using geometry books in your math classes? Why not? Even simple books can help students visualize concepts. Even books that might be considered “baby books” can be used in your upper elementary math. There is more than one way to use a book. Come read how we do it.

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