What do high quality task cards look like in the middle school classroom? Earlier, I reflected on just how much I’ve fallen in love with using task cards. Today I want to share some adjustments and “add-ons” I use with task cards to make sure they are effective. There are three specific things I wanted to make sure I addressed when designing task cards: self-correction and feedback, student accountability, and increasing complexity.
Task Cards in the Middle School Math Classroom
I was quickly converted to task cards after becoming a math teacher and now I can’t imagine teaching without them. Math task cards take center stage in my classroom now. I’m so excited to share with you 10 simple ways math task cards can energize your classroom! [Read more…] about Task Cards in the Middle School Math Classroom
What Hour of Code Taught Me About Teaching Math
During the week of December 7-13 classrooms and organizations around the world will be participating in Hour of Code Events, a basic introduction to coding for students of all ages (to be precise ages 4 to 104, according to their website). To date, over 100 Million students have worked on the activities at Hour of Code. This past summer Rachel and I taught a summer program drawing on the resources from this program. I found it personally entrancing- I didn’t want to stop working on my own coding exercises. I was excited to use it with students as an introduction to computer programming and a great way to ramp up the STEM opportunities for students. What I didn’t expect was to learn a great lesson about teaching and learning.
[Read more…] about What Hour of Code Taught Me About Teaching Math
Hello world!
Welcome to the Idea Galaxy Blog!
Welcome to the little piece of internet real estate known as Idea Galaxy Teacher! Idea Galaxy is the home of Rachel and Theresa, two educators who love geeking out about learning. Together we have 23 years of teaching experience in math, language arts, and ESL/ELL. We focus on making the content we’re teaching accessible to all students, especially those who are second language learners, have IEPs, or just need more time to learn. We are both avid readers, and especially enjoy studying the process and psychology of learning. We look at the classroom as the ultimate lab for a mad scientist- there are constantly new challenges presented and as educators we love brainstorming a solution, implementing it, measuring the results of the adjustment, and making further adjustments. We love jamming together about educational topics and the things we learn each day in our classrooms and work with other teachers, and are thrilled to be moving some of those jam sessions onto this platform. So, please read on, share your thoughts- we can’t wait to connect with like-minded educators. [Read more…] about Hello world!
