Brain Ninjas

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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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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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How to Demystify Math With These 7 Algebra Activities

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If you are avoiding algebra activities in your math class, we're here to help. We have several lessons and activities that can take the mystery out of your introductory algebra lessons and get you feelling confident about teaching it. We've got activities for patterns and algebra that you can use with any resources! Come have a read today!

When we hear that we have to do algebra activities, the fear is real. Algebra is this haunting reminder of high school. When I was becoming a teacher, I didn’t want my negative experiences with math to influence how I taught it or, more importantly, how my students learned it.

In university, I was put in a “special” math class designed for education students who needed to refine their math skills. Truthfully, it was for us creatives who didn’t take enough math during high school and university. At first, I was scared of the class, but as the class progressed, I realized how lucky I was to be there. Not only did I get over my fear of math, I learned how to break down math concepts in so many different ways that I could teach it to any student. Come learn some of the ways to break down introductory algebra with these algebra activities.

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15 Ways to Engage Readers During Your Read-Aloud

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If your administration thinks reading aloud to your students is a waste of time, you need to read this post full of ways to engage readers and teach your language arts outcomes. It goes far beyond listening skills. Come get a whole bunch of ideas on how to get the most out of your read aloud.

It seems that there is less and less time for reading aloud to your students, but if you use that read-aloud to engage your readers, you can teach so many different skills. Kids (and adults) of all ages love to be read to. If that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a thriving industry of audiobooks.

Administrators want teachers to focus their time on literacy and numeracy. Things like read-alouds seem like “entertainment,” but there is so much value in reading aloud to children. Come learn how we turn every read-aloud into a lesson (without our students even knowing it).

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7 Ways to Upgrade Your Fraction Strategies

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Apples used to show students fractions as parts of a whole, one of our visual fraction strategies.

Fractions can be a struggle for many students, but it really comes down to understanding them visually. Before we ever teach students the numerals or symbols, we try to show them the meaning of fractions visually in a variety of ways so they can truly understand parts, sets, and wholes. If you’ve ever struggled to teach fractions to your students, this is probably the post for you. Come try these fraction strategies that work for a wide range of learners.

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Astronomy Lessons That Are Out of This World

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Are you trying to find lessons for your space or astronomy unit? We gathered up our best lessons that inspire your students to research, learn, create and inquire about all thing space including stars, planets, space travel and astronauts. Come take a look and get your science lessons planned for the whole unit!

Ever since I can remember, the objects in space have fascinated me. Whether learning about Halley’s Comet in science class or taking astronomy lessons while in university, it has always been exciting to learn about the different objects in the Universe.

As an adult, learning about the different ways cultures talk about objects in space has been even more interesting. During a trip to Australia, the stories of the people who lived in the Luritja lands were shared during an astronomy presentation. It was the first time I had an appreciation that the Greek-named constellations and the stories I had learned growing up weren’t the first stories to be told about the stars. At that time, I started seeking out the stories told by Indigenous People across North America.

That is when I decided there were many more astronomy lessons to be learned in the classroom. Read on to see some of the lessons we use in our classroom.

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Amazing Measurement Activities to Stretch Math

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Are you looking for measurement activities to spice up your math lessons? We collected all our favourite ideas for our upper elementary classroom and put it all together for you. Come have a read and get your math class class planned in minutes.

Measurement is one of those math strands that requires lots of hands-on activities and practice. While students can learn about the different measurements and units through learning about them, it essentially takes a lot of practice measuring to really understand how all the measurements work together.

We have found that a combination of book learning and reference materials supports students while they use units to measure different items. Read on to learn about some of the different measurement activities we use to help students master the metric system (and other units of measurement).

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