Idiom Task Cards

I’ve been looking for some fun language arts task board activities for March and I came across these GREAT cards on Teachers Pay Teachers. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to access my account to log in, so I took the idea and ran with it. All in all, I think these were a success… grab a copy of this activity below!

Idiom Cards-1
Idiom Cards-2
Idiom Recording Sheet
 

Math Board Game Project

We are wrapping up our first semester here before the big Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday next week and I wanted to give my students a fun project that would help them review for the final exam. We love board games in my class, so any chance to integrate them into our learning, I’m all for. This is what I like to call “hiding vegetables in the lasagna” because it’s chock full of math, but it’s in the form of a fun board game- genius. Plus, who doesn’t love playing board games? J Anyway, this project was such a success last year that I thought I’d do it again. Here’s how we did it:

Each student group is responsible for creating a fun, challenging, and creative board game. This includes writing the game rules and objectives, creating question cards along with some form of an answer key, and making the actual game board. Class time and resources are available for them to complete this task, and when it’s finished, each group presents their game to the class. Once each group has presented their game, we take turns playing each of them during math or at task board time and then we take a little vote on which group had the best game. I give a little extra prize for the class favorite, but each group is graded according to the rubric for their own game. Here’s a copy of the project guidelines and rubric that I created if you want to try it out with your students… Enjoy!

 

What other math projects have you tried?

  

Word Clouds- 100 days

As the 100^th day of school approaches, I’ve been brainstorming all of the different ways that I can incorporate 100 into my lessons. I’ve seen about a million ideas online, but they all seem to be a bit too young for my 6^th graders. I’ve been looking for an excuse to have my class play around with tagxedo.com because I just love word clouds and have been using the site to make one for each week’s spelling words and hanging on our word wall.

So… I decided why not have the students come up with 100 words that they would use to describe themselves and put it in the form of a word cloud. I found that the task was just the right amounts of challenge and fun to make it a 100-day-worthy activity. Plus, this makes for a great computer task board station. Try it out with your class or play around with it just for fun. Enjoy!

Interactive World Map

Holy Moly, where do the weeks go? Sorry I’ve been missing for a while. We’ve jumped in head-first into our geography theme unit and I haven’t had time to catch my breath. Speaking of geography, here’s a little somethin’ that I’m doing with the kiddos this month as a homework/taskboard tie in with the theme.

I drew up this large world map on a sheet of butcher paper, making sure to not include anything except the outline of the continents. Then, I created these little daily geography activities and put them in an envelope ranging from drawing and labeling countries to locating mountain ranges to writing a journal entry from an early explorer’s perspective…the possibilities are virtually endless for this theme. Anyway, every day the kids choose one activity from the envelope to complete either for homework or during task board time. Then, we discuss our findings as a class and a couple of them transfer it from their homework onto the big map and color it in. At the end of the week, we have a short online quiz through edmodo over the content that they learned. It’s been pretty successful so far and they seem to be retaining most of what they’re learning, so I’m happy.

In addition, we've been working on a couple of interesting geography projects and gearing up for our math day competition at the end of the month. Needless to say things have been busy. Here are a few pictures of our interactive map board and the activity sheet I created if you’d like to try it in your class. Happy almost Friday, everyone!

Thankful for 30

Sorry I’ve been MIA all week…. You see, it’s Christmas and my mom’s here visiting all the way from America, so that’s my excuse. Anyway, I wanted to share this little thing that I did in class over the past month.

I got the idea from some facebook friends of mine in November. Basically, it’s a daily post about something that you’re thankful for and why. What better time for reflection than the holiday season, right? I thought this was the perfect morning task for my students in the month leading up to Christmas, so I printed out some blank ornament templates and made a “Thankful for 30” board on my door.

Check some of these out:

 

Hope you had a great Christmas with your loved ones!

Broken Sentences

Let’s face it, grammar stinks! There, I said it. It stinks to teach, it stinks to learn, it just plain stinks. Whenever I even say the word, my students cringe. But there’s no denying its importance in English. It is vital to the development of writing and oral skills and it’s something that needs to be practiced daily in a mostly-ESL environment. I tell my students that practicing good grammar is like flossing or working out; you don’t have to do it, but it’s always a good idea (although that doesn’t seem to sell them).

I wanted to try something a little more, well, fun for this week’s grammar lesson so I introduced them to the broken sentence. I’m sure this is not an original idea, but basically it’s a sentence that has been scrambled and the students have to “fix” it. The way that I did it requires a few minutes of extra prep time, but trust me, it was totally worth it. The kids were INTO IT! Here’s what I did today:

I printed a few questions and sentences on a piece of paper (large font/bold works best) then cut them into strips.

Cut each sentence up into individual words and mix them so they’re out of order.

Set up numbered stations around the room and had them copy the sentences into their grammar notebooks.

For an added bonus, I offered 10 cool points (our sticker system) if they could correctly answer or ask questions to match the broken sentence. For example, we’ve been studying second and third conditional and one of the broken sentences was:

·         If you met Justin Bieber, what would you say?

They would have to answer:

·         If I met Justin Bieber, I would …

This is a really great activity to trick engage students in grammar. J If you have any fun grammar activities, please share them. Thanks, and have a great night!

More math fun!

 

If you’re like me then you’re always looking for ways to fun up a math lesson for your kids. Unfortunately, students often feel intimidated or overwhelmed with challenging math concepts. It’s not uncommon for my students to zone out, get distracted, or even shut down completely during math and the funny thing is that I was the exact same way with math when I was growing up. I loathed sitting in math class and I dreaded being called on for fear of having the wrong answer. These days, it’s one of my absolute favorite subjects to teach because unlike so many other subjects, there are definitive answers. There’s something to be said for the formulaic, systematic, black and white side of life. So many things need interpretation and are subjective that it’s nice to teach with the left-brain throughout the day. I digress.

Anyway, so I’m constantly perusing Pinterest and other wonderful blogs for ways to bring life and fun into math and here are a couple of the things I’ve found that I’ve been using for task board just to reinforce some of the more difficult concepts we’ve been learning:

Math Jenga  

I’m sure most of you have played Jenga in day and guess what? It’s still fun even after all of these years! This game is not the quietest of activities, but it’s great for those task boards where you can play some music and have a little fun. All you need for this station is a Jenga set and some math problem cards. Now, there’s a couple ways to do this; a) you can tape the problems onto the blocks or b) you can have them draw a card for every block they successfully remove/replace. Here’s a picture for reference and I’ve attached my decimal division strips below if you want to use them. Enjoy!

Math Jenga- Dividing Decimals

Math Memory

Who doesn’t love a good game of memory, right? Ok, I have to admit that this one isn’t the fan favorite in class, but it beats me droning on at the front of the board for an hour. If you asked my kids, they’d say just about anything beats thatJ

For this one, I simply created a table in a word document where I imported problems and answers (in different boxes, of course), printed it out, then put a colored piece of cardstock behind it before laminating and BAM- you’re done. I generally use a different colored cardstock for each concept so they don’t get all mixed up together. I’ve made a couple of sets so far and they’re a really great review before a test. Feel free to snag the template below or leave a comment if you’ve got an easier way of doing it. Thanks and have a lovely night.

Decimal-Fraction Memory Cards

Decimal-Percentage Memory Cards

 

Treasure Island: A multi-purpose board game

Are you looking for a fun math station activity for task board time? Need an engaging way to help your kids review for an exam? Look no further; Treasure Island is the answer. It’s a board game that I made a couple of weeks ago to help my kids practice and review dividing decimals before their big test, but could easily be adapted for any subject. I drew the game board on a large piece of cardstock and printed out some pirate clipart from the internet to decorate it. Then, I created a table with leveled question cards in MS Word, printed them on different colored paper, and laminated them. I printed one extra sheet so the kids playing the game during task board time could show their work and sign the questions that they completed. I put the laminated question cards, player pieces, and dice in a small plastic baggie with game instructions in the math activity bin so it’s easy for the kids to just grab it and get to work. I will be adding different question cards before each big math test just to mix it up, but they really seemed to like it. Here are a couple of pictures of the board and the MS Word document that I created for the question cards. Enjoy!

 

Treasure Island Question Cards