Teaching in the big wired world

This week’s WOW is Maths Starter a Day. This site features a calendar that has links to a different maths problem for each day. The problems are based on a range of maths topics and encourage problem solving skills as they provide JUST enough information for the students to solve the problem. (Can be quite frustrating for some students at first until they start to develop their problem solving skills.)

I have used this in class as an introduction to the Maths lesson and it is also an excellent activity for early finishers. The problems range in difficulty and I would suggest that they are probably best suited to high grade 3 students and upwards.

All problems have the answers and usually some demonstration / explanation of how to solve the problems at the bottom of the page.

Here’s the poster for Maths Starter a Day

Here’s the site- Maths Starter a Day

Tags: Maths, problem solving, WOW

This week’s Website Of the Week is Writing Fun by Jenny Eather. This site used to be a part of Rainforest Maths before it closed down (it has reopened now). Writing Fun is excellent for showing kids the ‘recipe’ for many genres of writing. It comes with several examples (increasing in difficulty) of each genre and a printable template for the students to use when they are writing. Any genre’s writing lesson should start with this on the IWB.

I use this website to teach the students about each style of genre we are writing in.  After reading through the genre on the first day and reading a couple of examples, I get the students to lead the second and third day by coming up and circling the various parts, words etc on different examples.

Here’s the poster for writing fun.

Tags: IWB, literacy, WOW