Favorites for Friday: Improper Fractions and Mixed Numbers Video

Do you teach fractions at your grade level?  Do you need a quick fraction vocabulary review before you start working with fractions?  This video was a great help! It's relatively entertaining, but also provides great explanations for improper fractions and mixed numbers.  My students enjoy the subtle humor interspersed with thorough descriptions.  (Just beware -- many of my students started drawing mustaches for the fraction bar if it was a proper fraction.  Fun, but may begin to get confusing when others start seeing weird symbols on students' math papers.)

Do you have any other great videos for fractions?  I'd love to add them to my collection.  Feel free to post in the comments to share with others.  Or email me at MyCleverEndeavors2@gmail.com.  I'm always looking for new resources for my students!

Hope you enjoyed this week's Favorites for Friday! Thanks for visiting!  And HAPPY FRIDAY!

Favorites for Friday: Rounding Numbers

Ever try to teach a student with poor number sense skills to round numbers?  This week's favorite for Friday is a view of the video and anchor chart that made it all possible this year.  Even my most struggling students were rounding with ease after this!

First, we used this poem:

Then we watched this video: 

(pointing out the slight differences in the poem we use and the video's poem)

We made an anchor chart like this one:

(My anchor charts never look good enough for a photo!) 

This poem works with any place value, whether using very large numbers or decimal numbers. 

(We did another example on an anchor chart with a 9 in the selected place that needed to round up. That can be tricky, too!)

 For those of you that use the Common Core State Standards, I've included the 4th and 5th grade standards that relate to this particular skill:  

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.4.NBT.A.3
Use place value understanding to round multi-digit whole numbers to any place.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.5.NBT.A.4
Use place value understanding to round decimals to any place.

© Copyright 2010 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.

Thanks for visiting!  Happy Friday!

Favorites for Friday: Grammaropolis

This week’s Favorite for Friday is videos from Grammaropolis.

I love these videos.  They have a whole series – Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs, etc.  The tunes are catchy and fun.  They even color coordinate all the words they use in the videos – Nouns are blue, verbs are yellow (outlined in red), adjectives are orange and so on. 

The videos do a great job of explaining what the grammar concept is, and then they take it to more complicated grammar concepts.  For example, this noun song explains proper/common nouns, concrete/abstract nouns, compound nouns, and collective nouns.  By the time kids get to my 5^th grade class, they know what a basic noun is, but they struggle with the more complicated concepts, like abstract or collective nouns.  This video is great for supporting the higher grade level grammar we need in the upper grades.

So, now I’ll be singing this song all week.  J  Sorry if it gets stuck in your head, but think about how much we WANT that to happen to our students! 

Here are a few others:

Thanks for visiting today! 

Favorite Videos for 5th: Pronouns

We will be working on Pronouns soon in my 5th grade classroom.  I stumbled upon this video last year and my class would BEG to sing along with it!  It's very catchy.  :)

Got any great videos you use in your classroom?  Share in the comments below!  :)

Favorite videos for 5th: nouns

We start the year off with nouns in our grammar lessons.  This has always been one of my favorite videos.  I love the old School House Rock!  They've got a ton of videos for grammar, math, and history.

Favorite Videos for 5th: Study Jams

As I get ready to go back to school next week, I thought I'd start sharing some of my favorite video resources for my 5th graders.  Have you heard about Study Jams by Scholastic?  They have lots of videos and interactive activities for math and science.  Click the image above or use this link: http://studyjams.scholastic.com/studyjams/index.htm