Teaching students to do test corrections doesn’t have to be time consuming or result in a paper pile! Test corrections are actually one of my favorite tools for pushing students and measuring their progress. Giving math tests can be equally rewarding and frustrating. As a teacher, you can see what skills your students really understood and what skills you thought ...
Personal Financial Literacy Activities for Middle School
It doesn’t get more real-world in math than Personal Financial Literacy! I appreciate that real life concepts that impact growing teens and adults are incorporated into Texas state standards. Today, I am sharing ideas that support the personal financial literacy standards for middle school.Let's take a moment to at what is included in the Texas Personal Financial Literacy standards. ...
Student Data Tracking You Can Keep Up With
Student data tracking helps drive instructional decisions. I’ve been using daily exit tickets for years, and they would help me decide if I needed to reteach a skill, but I wasn’t tracking the data in a way that motivated my students and doing it daily seemed impossible when I tried. This year I have a system that I have managed to tweak, maintain, and really push my students and ...
Ideas for Organizing Math Intervention
If you are a classroom teacher, then you are probably very familiar with documenting student data and progress. Documenting the differentiation you are providing for every single student while also teaching said students can feel impossible. Hopefully, these tips for organizing your math intervention documentation will make it all more manageable. Plus, there are a few freebies to get ...
5 Ideas for Teaching Surface Area
Surface Area is the amount of space covering the outside of a 3D shape. This math concept allows students to visualize and is concrete, but that doesn’t mean all students will immediately excel. Let’s talk about some of our best tips for teaching surface area of prisms, cylinders, and pyramids.StandardsLet’s start with the standards. While surface area is covered in 8th CCSS, it spans ...
Utilizing Our STAAR Question Bank
STAAR is a registered trademark of the Texas Education Agency. Maneuvering the Middle® is not affiliated with or sponsored by the Texas Education Agency or the State of Texas.For Texas TeachersThe STAAR (State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness) is moving online with a variety of new open-ended question types. Maneuvering the Middle has designed a bank of questions to prepare ...
TEA STAAR Redesign
STAAR is a registered trademark of the Texas Education Agency. Maneuvering the Middle® is not affiliated with or sponsored by the Texas Education Agency or the State of Texas.For Texas TeachersIf you teach middle school math in the great state of Texas, then this is for you! The STAAR (State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness) has made some pretty significant changes starting in ...
Pi Day Activities
Pi Day (3.14 - March 14) is on a Tuesday in 2023. Embrace the chance to celebrate this mathematical holiday by circling back (see what I did there?) to these FREE activities for your students!We are happy to share that we have the perfect FREE activities (that’s right, plural!) for your students! Download your free resources below and read our best tips on teaching circles. Tips for ...
4 Ways to Make Math Relevant
We encounter math on a daily basis, but it can be a challenge for students to connect what they learn in class to the outside world. Here are 4 (update: 5!) ways teachers can engage students by making math relevant to their lives.LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCAST | SPOTIFY1. Share Your EnthusiasmThe key to modeling what it looks like to be a math person is to share your excitement! Excitement is ...
Factoring Polynomials with Special Cases
If you haven’t had a chance to read part 1 Teaching Factoring Trinomials, then go back and do that before reading anymore. Today we are going to discuss Factoring Polynomials with special cases.Factoring Trinomials When A>1I hesitated to put a>1 in this blog post since it isn’t necessarily a special case, but I considered that you probably would teach this AFTER you teach factoring ...