Picture Pie Fractions

I know this isn't exactly the most technology-laden lesson, but it turned out great and I wanted to share it. I was surfing for some ideas to help me teach fractions, I came upon the Math Cats idea bank, which is a decent site. It mentioned Picture Pie by Ed Emberly. I remembered Ed Emberly from my childhood. He taught me how to draw! So I checked it out from my school library and looked at how he created the amazing plants and animals out of circles and fractions of circles. He uses whole circles, halves, quarters, and eighths. I had my students fill out a label paper telling how many of each fraction piece they had in their plant/animal. I decided that my students could do it and would love it. Check out the results:

Here's an example of a fraction animal.

There are more animals and plants up there now, but this is how it started.

News for Kids

At the recent institute I attended, I was introduced to a couple of fun kid-news sites. Prior to that, I had only been able to find one (after many hours of searching). I'm excited about them all. They each have some positives. So I am going to take a deeper look at each one over the next few posts. I'm going to start off with the one I found: Tween Tribune.

Tween Tribune is a site with wonderful age-appropriate news stories that my students have loved. The stories are sorted into 16 different topics that they can read about, such as animals, fashion, odd news, tweens in the news, etc. If you have older students or students who are Spanish speaking, when you register on the site, you have access to the Teen Tribune and the TTEspanol as well the Tween Tribune.  AND, best of all, it's all FREE!!!!

After you create your teacher account, you can decide whether to create accounts for your students yourself or have them create their own accounts. It's not difficult at all. The one tricky thing is the security question. I had my students choose the favorite movie question since they are all into movies it seems. However, I had them type the movie titles themselves. That became a problem because some of them misspelled the movie, which led to some scrambling on my part. This year, I am going to have a movie title already chosen for each child and give it to them on a slip of paper so they have less of a chance to misspell it.

The reason I really enjoy the Tween Tribune is that the students can comment on the stories. This brings some authenticity to the assignment of read a story and post a comment. The comments don't automatically post, though. You have to approve them first, which is a great feature. That serves two great functions. First off, if any inappropriate comments are made, you know who made them. Secondly, it allows you to see the types of comments each student makes. One bonus feature about the comments is that they MUST be 25 words long in order to post. If a student has fewer than 25 words, it will notify them so they can go back and add some details accordingly.

There are other features on the site, such as posting a story and a "faculty lounge" where teachers can share ideas and lesson plans, but I'll let you check that out yourself. Now that I have put my thoughts to words, I really have a grasp on why this site is so important to me. This blogging stuff my just work out.

My next post will take a look at the next kid-news site, Dogo News.

And in the beginning

So, if I am going to start this blog, I should probably begin somewhere. I am just finishing up the Tech.It.U Institute at Central York high school. It has been an amazing learning experience. It's from this week's worth of knowledge that I will draw upon for content in my blog. I am going to explore everything I can, technology wise, before school starts up in August. From there, I will be writing about how the integration is going. If you are wondering why I'm starting now, check this out:

I saw this on Richard Byrne's blog, http://www.freetech4teachers.com/, which I recommend you put on your Symbaloo or Google Reader. I'd also recommend you follow him on Twitter. He's awesome!