Mardi Gras is traditionally celebrated on the Tuesday prior to the beginning of Lent. Mardi Gras translated means Fat Tuesday. Many people also enjoy the Polish sweet pastry, paczki on Fat Tuesday (in English, the common pronunciation is ponch-kee). Get in the celebration by making masks and downing festive attire. Make a Mardi Gras...
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  Great book for young students. My students have enjoyed reading the book and now it’s time to share it with the others in the class. My reading group has just finished reading, “Because of Winn-Dixie” and I was wondering what to do to wrap it up and found these great sites.  I intend...
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Recycle Creations I have never met a child that their eyes didn’t light up when they were given an opportunity to make anything to their hearts desire. On a day that it’s too cold to play outside, watch your child stay busy and happy for hours! Materials: Gather interesting and clean containers from everyday...
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  Using this sentence to help your students remember the order of operations. You can have  your students make posters to illustrate the sentence: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally!  Each letter represents the sequence to approach math problems: parenthesis exponents multiplication division addition subtraction Here are some online games that your students can...
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  “Chasing Vermeer is a puzzle, wrapped in a mystery, disguised as an adventure, and delivered as a work of art.” This activity mirrors what is happening in the story. Calder in the story uses pentominoes to figure out problems. Pentominoes are 5 squares attached on one edge that make 12 different pieces.  They...
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  As a beginning writing project for all of our students, we had them design, build then write a manual for that robot.  As unique as all of students are, so were the robots.  The manuals had to include: a labeled diagram, a section to tell what the robot can do and a trouble-shooting...
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                         ____________________________________________   I have small apples that I put numbers on that I can use for a variety of skills. I tell my students to use the apples to make the following problems in the apples! Young children -  Take 3 apples and add them all together....
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You’ll want to gather a variety of leaves for your children/students to examine.  Also have a magnifying glass available for those future detectives!  Look carefully at a each leaf and see how the veins run. What kind is it? Describe how it looks. Draw a picture of it. Look at another leaf and how...
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Have a variety of apples available; Granny Smith, Gala, McIntosh and any others you may have in your area.  Prepare by cutting up  the apples into slices and make a graph for everyone to make select their favorites then let the fun begin.  I always ask my students to “try” something new whenever I...
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    Learning math facts, especially addition, are the foundation of years of learning.  So when my students struggle with or don’t see the point of making the effort to learn them, I had to come up with something.  So when we decided to start the year with robots I came up with this...
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