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This site supported by the American Federation of Teachers and TES offers free preK-12 lesson plans and resources for many subjects, including physical education and world languages. Resources are rated by teachers and you can search by content area, most popular and more. Teachers can add this to their arsenal of teaching activities and lessons when work on improving their curriculum, particularly those using a data action plan model, such as in our EDTC 615 course.

This free resource has lesson plans and professional development articles. I found the article on differentiating addition and subtraction lessons using technology very helpful. This resource has many activities and lessons that will assist with improving curriculum.

As stated by the MobyMax software program, it "combines curriculum resources like placement tests, adaptive lessons, progress monitoring, IEP reporting with teacher tools, and motivational features (badges, games, and contests)." Users are able to upload student rosters for this program that accommodates grade levels k-8. Drill-and-practice lessons/assessments are Common Core State Standard aligned for both mathematics and reading content. My students and I enjoyed this software as a supplement to classroom instruction. With kid-friendly visuals and quick feedback on assessment scores, this classroom supplement will make learning more engaging.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.6.1.b Support claim(s) with clear reasons and relevant evidence, using credible sources and demonstrating an understanding of the topic or text. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.6.2 Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas, concepts, and information through the selection, organization, and analysis of relevant content.

This is a great site for teachers that has free feature and a cheap pay feature. The free feature will still give educators access to worksheets, but with the paid for version you can edit the worksheets to fit more of your classroom style. This helps tie real world problems into the math classroom, helping with the age old question "When will I ever use this." Hopefully this connection will help students not only enjoy math but remember it more too.

Week 9: This is a journal article that ties in the importance of screencasts and mathematical education. The article delves deeper into e-learning and evaluates the effectiveness of screencasts on both math and science. Screencasts can be used as instructional strategies for increasing learning beyond what an individual educator can do for any one child at a time. The key behind this strategy in its value is if it is reused enough times to impact learning. It is a resource to keep in mind when planning for reteaching or providing more exposure and support for a concept learned.

This url directs users to a video that displays a strategy using numbers/symbols as well as concrete blocks how to subtract by decomposing a ten or a hundred. This website can be used as a resource to support learners showing difficulties with performing the operation where they need to decompose across 2 place values visually.

Week 9: This is a great website to connect students to real life math problems. By doing math with real life problems students are problem solving like they would in a word problem, sometimes without even knowing it. This site gives sample lessons and projects to help teachers and parents connect math to the real world. Math covers so many topics that hopefully you can connect to your students that like music, design, weather and so much more.

The different resources on this site that give activities and ideas to introduce real world math situations to students gives an alternative way to teach mathematical concepts. Teaching these math concepts from multiple perspectives increases the chance of student success. By connecting math to the real world, students will become more invested in their learning.

This website provides links to many different websites that provide activities that students can participate in that will help them incorporate real world math problems. The article was sectioned off into four distinct sections including collections of real world math problems, online math activities, math collaboration, and more real world math activities. This is certainly a website that is worth saving and coming back to over a course of the year as there are many valuable resources that can be used.

This article addresses the deeper connections between music education and bigger literacy goals. It especially discusses applications for improving literacy outcomes in secondary education students.

This article argues that we, as a society, are misguided in our approach to teaching to the test, when it comes to critical reading. The author argues that it is not simply enough to teach reading strategies to students because research has demonstrated that there is an absolute necessity to teach context and content for essential background knowledge. This seems to stand in the face of the common tagline in education that it is not What we teach, but how we teach. To tackle this issue, it is recommended that teachers take a more curriculum based approach in reading tests. That is to say, that teachers don't simply choose texts arbitrarily, but rather, in order to teach to these high-stakes tests and core standards, that teachers very mindfully construct a curriculum which builds student exposure and study of key informational texts.

This study focuses on the stages of literacy development in Kindergarten up to 8th graders. The author states how children's minds do not learn by taking mental pictures or by memorizing but by constructing mental images over time. It also includes resources to engage students in word study at various levels.

This resource explains how children from grades K-8 develop their knowledge of words/vocabulary. It explains how teachers can instruct in a way that meets each learner's needs by expanding from what they already know, adding new content, but not too much where the teacher frustrates the learner. This resource helps with my groups SMART Target Learning goals because it meets everyone's grade level (K-8), and focuses on reading skills.

SMART Goal: By the end of marking period 3, 80% or higher of students will score a 90% or higher on a representing numbers assessment. This website is offers fun and engaging games to support math development of students grades pre-kindergarten through high school. When selecting a grade level, teachers can view a large list of skills associated with Common Core. Skills are categorized, making it easy for educators to look for desired math practice. In regard to the SMART goal posted above the teacher could select from the series of skills related to representing numbers such as: Counting tens and ones - up to 20, County on ten frames - up to 40, and Counting by tens - up to 100. Students will be motivated by this resource as it is colorful and interactive. A benefit to using this site is that when students are unable to answer a correctly, they are provided with an explanation of how to correctly apply the skill.

It is impressive to watch critical thought happen in a classroom. Through this link you are able to watch a lesson that helps students build higher order thinking skills. This middle school literature lesson brings in the ELA Common Core by teaching how to analyze how a section in text fits into the overall theme and to cite textual evidence to support analysis of text. Through student-driven questioning, the entire class is engaged in critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation. This outstanding lesson was driven by the teacher as she required them to develop higher-level questions using Costa's question levels, verb starters, and Blooms Taxonomy. I have not used this technique of providing these questioning terms to my students to have the them develop the questions. I cannot wait to try this out next school year!

This video from the Teaching Chanel highlights ways and the importance of creating higher order questions in order to analyze and discuss a text. This would be a great resource for my Smart Goal of With my SMART goal: by the end of quarter 1, 60% of students will score a 70% or higher on the Quarter 1 Literacy Assessment. The Quarter 1 literacy assessment is on theme, standard RL 4.2. Having my students become "the teachers" of their own learning and create higher level questions can help them get a deeper understanding of the text and in turn, determine the theme.

This is a website that lets teacher find lesson plans that link math and the real world. Some lesson plans are free and others you need to pay for. This is great for high school teachers because the lessons have a heavy econ focus and most students like learning about and working with money.

This website contains a wide variety of virtual manipulative that can be maneuvered by all learners at all stages. Both students and teachers can use this to demonstrate understanding as well as modeling a strategy. All viewers are able to see concrete place values as well as the composition and decomposition of hundred and ten blocks. It is a great tool for the visual learner and those who are still in the concrete stage in addition/subtraction.

The following is a pdf file about how to integrate writing into mathematics. It is a fantastic resource from the Michigan Department of Education that addresses integrating Common Core skills into every subject area.

Diigo's default comment: LearnZillion is the world's first open, cloud-based curriculum. We help teachers, schools, and districts improve instruction and respond to the specific needs of their students. My comments: Learn zillion provides a large bank of instructional videos and resources that align to the Common Core. The lessons are designed for teachers or students. I often show bits and pieces of certain videos to my students during our ELA or Math block. Occasionally I will just use a Learnzillion video for myself as a refresher on strategies for teaching a specific standard. This resource can help identify and eliminate instructional gaps in the classroom. Teachers can even log in and assign their students specific videos or just share a link.