The Gift of Time

Frequently, teachers ask me how I have time to find, research and learn technology integration ideas, tools and techniques.  I have learned some strategies that save me time and I thought, in the season of giving, I would share a few comprehensive lesson plan websites that are high quality and easy to navigate.  My goal for this blog is to help keep things simple as readers delve into expanding their technology integration with students. 

There are many quality lesson plan websites and teachers will need to decide whether or not modification of someone else's lesson plan is necessary.  That supports the "art" and "science" of teaching.  That being said, here are some resources for you to consider as you plan your next unit or a lesson.  The websites are free, searchable by curriculum, and printable.

• Read Write Think from the Verizon Foundation  

Thinkfinity from the Verizon Foundation

Scholastic's  Lesson Plans - Lessons for K-12 and adult education

 Awesome Library

 I hope these sites will provide you with helpful, quality lesson plans that effectively link to your standards, curriculum maps, etc.  These are just four of many quality lesson plan websites.  If you already use other lesson plan sites, please share them in a comment.  Also, if you find the sites that I have shared are useful, take a minute to share how the resources helped you in your teaching.  

Happy holidays to all who read my blog.  Thank you and Happy New Year.  I look forward to continuing my "keeping it simple" blogging in 2011!

Looking Back at 2010 Via New York Times Quiz

With less than two weeks left in 2010, you may want to end the year or begin next year with a look back.  What is news today can be forgotten so quickly and I am sharing one resource for you and your students to take a minute to look back and see what you remember.  Today's New York Times offers an online quiz about events they covered or wrote about during 2010.   

News Quiz | Farewell, 2010

By ANNISSA HAMBOUZ and KATHERINE SCHULTEN

 

 

Also, check out the retrospective that includes detailed lesson ideas that correlate to the events/quiz questions.

Your students can take the quiz on line or you can print the quiz from the PDF link.  

Those of you who teach English language learners, try the Google translate.  You can translate the site to dozens of languages.

 

 The quiz offers teachable moments and offers students an opportunity to check their knowledge of current events.  The authors keep it simple so you can focus on the importance of retrospective teaching ideas.  They offer 9 ideas with links.  In addition, they provide links to a number of other retrospectives for 2010.   Congratulations to Annissa Hambouz and Catherine Schulten  for this well developed look back at 2010.

 

 PDF version of the quiz. The link is provided on the quiz site.                                                              I hope you find this activity helpful and interesting.  I encourage you to share your thoughts or ideas on retrospectives in the classroom. 

Making Math Relevant with YummyMath

I baked cookies this weekend so Yummy Math is a perfect site to blog about today.  Two educators, Bill Marks and Leslie Lewis, created this site that offers downloadable lessons (doc and pdf) using real world examples.
The tabs on the left are the topics they cover.  They include food math, holidays, sports, geometry, and several more topics.

The web layout keeps it simple to navigate around the site.  In addition, the lesson documents are well done and offer clear examples that you can use with your students. Below is a screen shot that shows part of the "Not Enough Mashed Potatoes"  lesson and problems that students would solve.  It even includes a recipe.  Now that's real world!

As I have said before in this blog, I am a believer that teachers do not need to reinvent the proverbial wheel for quality instructional material.  Sites like YummyMath offer teachers well-developed, creative material for your lessons under Creative Commons Attribution.  It is important to credit the authors when you use the material and the link will provide you with more information.

I hope you find YummyMath worth checking out and that you look for ways to incorporate real-world math into your instruction.
    Have a wonderful week!