Thursday, February 18, 2016

Fun Math Activities for Parents To Do With Their Kids

Bedtime Math is a great site on which you can locate fun mathematics activities for elementary school and middle school students. The activities are designed for students to do at home with their parents. Of course, the activities could also be used in your classroom. The Bedtime Math activities incorporate common household objects. Today's lesson is about the comparative values

In addition to the written math lessons Bedtime Math has a few math videos that you may want to check out. I've embedded a couple of them below.


Growth Mindset - Big Ideas for the Classroom

Last month ClassDojo launched a new video series that they are calling Big Ideas. The series is all about growth mindset as it pertains to classrooms. The series introduces students, parents, and teachers to big ideas or trends in education. ClassDojo's Big Ideas does this through the use of videos and accompanying discussion guides. The fifth installment in the Big Ideas series was released this week. This installment, embedded below, teaches students about the importance of attitude when facing a challenge in learning something new.


A discussion guide for the video can be found here.

C-SPAN Offers a Free Electoral College Poster and Lesson Plans

C-SPAN Classroom is one of my go-to sources of ideas for lessons on current events related to U.S. government and politics. Membership in C-SPAN Classroom is free and provides members with lots of digital and physical resources. One of the resources C-SPAN Classroom is currently offering to members is a poster about the Electoral College.

C-SPAN's 2016 Electoral College Map shows the number of Electoral votes each state has in 2016. The poster also includes the Electoral vote and popular vote tallies of the every election dating back to 1900. You can get a copy of the poster here.

Applications for Education
The poster on its own is nice, but students will need some guidance in understanding what all of the information really means. To that end C-SPAN Classroom offers a set of guiding questions to use with your students in conjunction with the 2016 Electoral College Map.