Sep 4, 20144 min read

Tips for Teachers Weekly Linky Party - Week 4

9/04/2014

Can you believe it's week 4 of tips for teachers already? I hope you are enjoying these tips! I have some more great tips that I am excited to share with you this week! Come check them out and link up your own teaching tips!

Use pizza boxes to organize math games! This great idea came from one of my Facebook fans, Nina H. She also sent me these fabulous pictures! She said that she purchased the boxes at GFS marketplace. I love how she has labeled the top and front of each box so students can quickly find the game they are looking for.

She also suggests placing task cards in old VHS tape boxes and labeling the outsides to make them easily accessible. What a great way to reuse them! Check out her amazing collection of math games below!

If you have more tips like this one please share with me in the comments below or on my FB page. If your tip is used on my blog I'll send you $5 worth of products from my store!

Do you ever have trouble getting students to turn in their homework? I tried everything to get students to turn in their work from docking points to calling parents but nothing seemed to work until I found Homeworkopoly! Homeworkopoly is a great way to motivate students to do their work and turn it in on time! Each day students that turned in their work completed (and on time) got to play Homeworkopoly. It is very similar to Monopology where students roll a die and move that number of spaces. They can land on prizes like "Free Homework Pass" or pass Go and collect a prize. I just used little animal pics as their game pieces and attached them with poster putty (you can see them on the boar if you look close).

The boxes below the bulletin board contain the prize for passing go and the mystery prizes. The folder contains the brain buster activities (for landing on the brains) and a homework checkoff list (with each students name). I would pick one student each day to be in charge of collecting everyone's work and marking off their names on the list. My fourth graders LOVED it and it definitely motivated them to do their homework. The best part is you can download the game for free here! To assemble, I printed all the pages and glued them onto a sheet of large white paper (since we didn't have any white I used the back side of a yellow roll of bulletin board paper that was white). The only downside I found was that our school laminator wasn't big enough to fit it so I had to bring it to Kinkos and it cost almost $50 to laminate! Yikes! It was hard as a rock laminated though so it will last forever!

Use the "Save as Default" options for shapes and text boxes! Oh my! I just learned this tip while reading in the TpT forum and it is going to save me so much time! Now I think this only works for each presentation but the great thing is if you want to have the same style just do a "Save as Template" and you can use it again and again! All you have to do is create a shape and customize it to the look and feel you want. Then you right click on the shape and select, "Set as Default Shape".

Now the next time you go in to add a shape (any shape) it will automatically be customized (like the arrow below)! The same is true for text boxes. You can select the font, color, size, etc. and then right click and select, "Set as Default Text Box" and now when you add a new text box it will automatically have those properties (like the "Nice Work!" below).

This next tip is a teaching strategy I used with students in my resource room. When teaching them to divide I would use cards (colored pieces of construction paper) and teddy bear counters. If the problem is 15 ÷ 3, have students count out 15 teddy bears and place 3 cards in front of them.

Then they have to equally divide the bears among the 3 cards (by putting one bear on each card, then adding another bear on each card and so on) to get their answer of 5. When they answer it they should say, "15 bears divided into 3 equal groups equals 5 bears per group". You could also use this strategy to teach about remainders. Have students count out 16 bears and divide them evenly amongst the 3 groups and they will see that they have 5 in each group with 1 left over so their answer should be 5 remainder 1.

When you are a teacher, the crock pot is your friend! Nothing is better than coming home from a long day of teaching to the smell of a delicious meal just waiting for you to enjoy! It is definitely worth getting up five minutes early to throw a few frozen chicken breasts, a can of mushrooms, some chopped potatoes and carrots and a can of cream of mushroom soup into the crock pot! It's so easy and so nice not to have to think about dinner when you are tired from working all day!

Just don't forget to turn it on and set the timer! Oh yeah, I've done that before! Really stinks!!! I've also done an entire load of laundry (filled the water, poured in the soap, ran it) and forgot to add the laundry! But at least that was when I was pregnant and had a good excuse for my absent-mindedness! LOL! ANYWAYS, the crockpot is wonderful so don't forget to take advantage of it! For some quick and easy recipes my favorite go-to website is AllRecipes.com. I also find that it can be extremely helpful to read the reviews first!