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Ninja Notes

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Math Lessons

7 Ways to Upgrade Your Fraction Strategies

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Teaching fractions can be a challenge when students struggle. We put together some of our best fraction strategies to help you teach fractions to your upper elementary students. Come have a read!

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 are usually simple enough for all students to master.

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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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How to Teach Students to Tell Time

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Teaching time can be a stressfull situation in math class. How do you teach your students to tell time? We've put together all our activities for reading clocks, understanding the 12 Hour and 24 Hour clock, AM/PM, elapsed time and calendars. Come add these activities to your time lessons!

Teaching students to tell time is a necessary and difficult challenge, but time lessons are a life skill.

Some people argue that reading analog clocks is a skill that is slowly disappearing. Perhaps one day, digital clocks will completely take over, but for now, they are still around, causing grief for teachers and students around the world during time lessons in math class.

Come learn some of the activities we use to help our students learn to read the time with these time lessons that will save you time.

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How to Differentiate Math Lessons

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What is a teacher to do when there are such vast differences in skill levels during math class? How do you differentiate math lessons? Come learn some of the ways we streamlin differentiation in our upper elementary classroom.

Differentiated instruction is expected of most classroom teachers these days. Long gone are the times when one worksheet could be given to every member of the class and they would all work on that page until every question was done correctly. Since the pandemic began, the once manageable (pause for laughter here) learning gaps between students have gotten even worse. So what is a teacher to do when there are such vast differences in skill levels during math class? How do you differentiate math lessons?

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How to Help Your Students Master Decimal Operations

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We find that many students struggle with decimal operations because their understanding of decimal number sense has a few holes in it. Come learn some of the ways we support our grade four and grade five students before, during and after learning to add and subtract decimals. And come grab a free set of decimals place value task cards to get you started.

Some students have difficulty working with decimals. Others misunderstand how place value helps when working with decimals operations. And other students struggle with number operations in general. Read on to find out the ways we support the different math learners in our classroom before working with decimal operations.

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How to Change Math With Interactive Notebooks

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Are you avoiding interactive math notebooks because they seem like too much work? Are you struggling to teach math because you worry about your own knowledge base? Never fear! We have the solutions! Let's get you teaching math today!

When a colleague told us we should try interactive notebooks in math, we agreed and then went on our merry ways and did math the same old way for another year.

At the end of that school year, she approached us again and DEMANDED we buy an Interactive Math Journal lesson plan set. We took a look, bought it and then went on summer vacation, never to think about math for a whole two months.

Near the end of the summer, we opened it up and it CHANGED OUR WORLD. We will never teach math the same way again. That being said, there are a few things we learned about the process and we wanted to share these tips with you so you don’t have to spend so much time figuring things out yourself.

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