Brain Ninjas

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YouTube

How to Leverage the Power of YouTube in Your Classroom

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Are you using YouTube in your upper elementary classroom? Why not? It is full of ready-made resources for everything from science, to math to documentaries. Come take a look at how we make the most of it and you can, too.

As you know, YouTube is a wealth of resources for professional learning, both for fun and for learning how to fix your broken gas dryer (ninjas like to fix their own things, after all). Using YouTube in the classroom with your students is also a powerful tool (assuming you are allowed to)! Schools and districts that block YouTube are living in the wrong century! To us, it would be like banning a library (but that is a whole other issue and worthy of its own post).

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How to Teach Successful Long Division Strategies

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Do your upper elementary students struggle with long division? We've collected all our best tools for helping students master long division and you can have them all. Come read this post and see how we can help your students feel better about math.

Long division has long been one of the most challenging concepts for students in Grade 4 and Grade 5 to master. There are a few reasons students struggle with long division, so we’ve tried to break down some of the ways we set our students up for success.

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Conquer Math With These Proven Multiplication Strategies

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Are you struggling with teaching multiplication because students just don't know their times tables? Check out these ways we practice and build math fact fluency without the pressure ot timed drills.

We have taught students in grades four and five for so long and one trend we’ve noticed is that students cannot retain their multiplication times tables. What is happening to those little brains? Or is it because we teach these facts differently? We’ve been thinking about the different multiplication strategies we use in our classroom.

When we went to school, math drills were all the rage. But to be honest, the stress of answering sixty multiplication questions in less than a minute was horrible. And, I was lucky because I knew my times tables, but I just couldn’t write fast enough no matter how hard I tried. Those drills weren’t an assessment of my math skills. They were an assessment of how quickly I could write.

And don’t even get me started about the time I wrote a zero, but it was messy and looked like a six. Ugh! So, I knew I couldn’t give my students math drills. Here’s what we do instead.

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