Ninja Notes

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Teaching Strategies

Love Math and Explore Perimeter With Your Young Mathematicians

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There are lots of fun ways to explore perimeter measurement in your upper elementary classroom and we've written up a whole post full of our favourite ideas. Come read it today!

When people ask, “When will I ever use this?” perimeter is often an example of a real-world skill that people need. Understanding how to measure it is important for construction, landscaping, sewing, and painting.

Students usually start off understanding perimeter when we measure with non-standard units. But, as soon as we start adding formulas or other measurements, like area, students begin to struggle. Check out the ways we help build a strong foundation for measuring perimeter with our upper elementary students.

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How to Teach Poetry All Year Long

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Instead of teaching poetry in a unit, have you ever considered sprinkling poetry throughout the school year? It's a great way to show students that poetry is all around us. Come learn about some of the ways we include poetry in our language arts lessons throughout the year.

Many teachers add a poetry unit to their Language Arts programming, but what if you teach poetry throughout the school year? It’s not as hard as it sounds and you don’t even have to be a poetry expert.

Poetry is a beautiful and expressive form of literature that allows students to explore language, imagery, and emotions in creative ways. Many students enjoy poetry because it’s short and the rhyming is catchy. Come learn some of the ways we teach poetry throughout the school year.

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Teach Your Students How to Create Line Plots

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Teaching line plots can be challenging, but we've got some tried and true methods to teach dot plots (or line plots) to your students when you are introducing graphing or reviewing. Come take a look.

Most students feel comfortable making a bar graph, but line plots (or dot plots) can be difficult for some students. It is important to understand line plots so you can teach your students to master them. Come learn how we introduce and teach dot plots to our students as part of our graphing and statistics lessons.

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How to Teach Decimals Place Value

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Are you looking for ways to help your students master decimal place value? We put together our best activities to help teach, review, practice and assess decimals place value in your upper elementary math class.

For some students, place value comes second nature, but for others, it can be very challenging. Once you add decimals into the mix, it can become downright confusing. Come check out some of the strategies we use to help students master decimals place value.

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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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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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