Brain Ninjas

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Five Amazing Capacity Quests to Enliven Your Classroom

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Teaching students to measure capacity can be a fun and engaging hands-on activity for your upper elementary math class. Come learn about some of the different ways we help our students learn to measure capacity in metric units.

Teaching students how to calculate capacity using metric units is an essential skill in mathematics and in life. If you’ve ever tried to put your leftovers in the wrong container, you know it’s important to be able to use referents and measure containers properly. Finding resources that measure capacity in metric units can also be a challenge for teachers in Canada, but we have you covered. Learning about capacity is more than just using formulas. Come learn some of the ways we teach this measurement concept in our upper elementary classroom.

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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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Plotting on the Cartesian Plane During Math Class

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If you are looking for ways to teach the Cartesian plane, ordered pairs or coordinates in your elementary math class, come check out this post full of practical ideas.

The Cartesian plane was named after the mathematician René Descartes. This is now an outcome in the Alberta Mathematics Curriculum and somehow we made it through all our university math classes without needing that information.

The plane is a fundamental tool that can represent relationships between two variables. Most of that goes right over the heads of elementary students, but if you talk to them about the game Battleship, most realize they’ve already been using the Cartesian plane. Come learn how we teach the quadrants and coordinates.

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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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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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