Class Antics – Inside Elementary Education

Great news!  My newest math learning product, Best Multiplication Workbook EVER! won two awards for 2011:  Dr. Toy’s Top 100 products and Dr. Toy’s Top 10 Educational Products.

“This innovative math workbook is useful for home or school, when multiplication is introduced or for remedial work in other grades. This workbook focuses on how kids think, how they learn, and how they have fun learning new material.”

Click here to learn more about the workbook and the FREE software you can download for addition and times tables practice.

Who is Dr. Toy?  Stevanne Auerbach, PhD, is one of the nation’s and world’s leading experts on play, toys, and children’s products.  Dr. Toy started her career as a teaching and reading specialist, helped establish the first childcare centers for federal employees, and founded the San Francisco International Toy Museum.  You have to love her for this: Dr. Auerbach was responsible for approving the first Department of Education grant to Sesame Street!

With 30 years of specialized experience, Dr. Auerbach evaluates educationally oriented, developmental and skill building products from the best large and small companies in four annual awards programs.  Parents, teachers and toy buyers rely on Dr. Toy’s guidance in selecting products for children.

Dr. Toy’s motto is “Let’s play!”  Best Multiplication Workbook EVER! perfectly fits Dr. Toy’s philosophy that play is educational, and education can be fun.  I totally agree with Dr. Toy that one of the best teaching techniques (EVER!) is helping kids discover that learning is fun!

Thank you, Dr. Toy!

It’s the time of year when standardized tests take center stage in schools.  My students (third grade) took a high-stakes standardized test; for most, it’s the first time in their young lives in the testing environment.  I wrote about this challenge last year:

How kids take standardized testsHow to make State Achievement Test week AWESOME (for teachers)

Dos and Don’ts for the State Writing Test

Links for parents looking for information on how to help their students: 

Disney Family Website Article: What Every Parent Should Know About Standardized Testing  “Thirty years ago, American school children spent two or three days a year bubbling in answers on standardized tests. Today, children in some school districts spend as much as 18 days per 180-day school year on standardized testing.”

 Testing Our Schools: A Guide for Parents  “This guide will answer some of your questions and give you information about testing. Use the guide to help you understand more about school testing, define your questions and concerns, and help your child prepare for taking tests.”

There’s an entire section of my new book, Best Multiplication Workbook EVER!  that deals with standardized test taking strategies.  Most students take standardized tests for the first time in third grade, and third grade is when the curriculum emphasizes developing multiplication skills.  My workbook deconstructs word problems and strategies to identify the correct answer to multiple choice questions, skills that apply to far more than just getting multiplication problems right.

This post is part of a series of tips and strategies for taking standardized tests.

Analysis of a standardized test word problem using the Given/Find method:

 José is happy to have 3 pledges for his school’s Read-a-thon.  Person A gives José a $20 bill. Person B pledges $3 for each book José reads.  Person C pledges $1 for each chapter José reads.   José read 5 books with a total of 27 chapters. Who will pay José the most money?

a. Person A
b. Person B
c. Person C
d. $25.00

Analysis: for simplicity, underline the facts in the problem if you are allowed to write on the test

Given:
3 pledges
Person A – $20
Person B – $3 per book
Person C – $1 per chapter
5 books
27 chapters

Find: Who pays the most?

Solution: Notice that answer d) cannot be correct because the question asks WHO will pay the most.  Cross it off!

Person A: $20
Person B: $3 x 5 = $15
Person C: $1 x 27 = $27

Person C pays the most, so the correct answer is c.

Example taken from my new workbook: Best Multiplication Workbook EVER!

This continues my series of posts on standardized test prep.

The Given/Find Method

First, write down all the numbers in the problem.  This is the given information.

Next, write down what you are trying to find—and what unit will be used to measure it. Tip: to help you remember, underline what you are trying to find.

Finally, figure out which operations you need (add, subtract, multiply, divide) to determine the correct answer.

Often, the multiple choice answers include one answer that clearly is incorrect.  Cross it off!  Some choices are way too big or way too small. You can estimate and cross off these incorrect answers. Other answers often come from steps you take to answer the question.  These answers are there to fool you. 

Be sure to finish the problem and find the answer to the question that was asked.

There! That wasn’t so hard.  I’ll deconstruct a typical multiple choice question in a future post.

Here’s a simple way to keep track of your estimates, guesses and solutions: Cross off the wrong answers!

 Review the answers before you solve the problem. Often, you can eliminate obviously wrong answers.

 * Cross off answers you can identify as wrong even before you start solving the problem. 

* Cross off answers that you can identify as wrong or incomplete as you work.

 * Cross off answers that correctly compute part of the solution when multiple operations are needed to solve the problem.

* If the word problem requires a person, place or thing in the answer, cross off answers that only have numbers.  This is especially important when the number you cross off is the correct answer to the word problem.  

* When you check your answer, be sure you answered the question that was asked! Remember even with math tests, the right answer might not be a number: it might be a person, place or thing!

Newly released: Best Multiplication Workbook EVER!
Order now!
Also available from Amazon.com.

I’m blowing my own horn: Best Multiplication Workbook EVER! is a great resource for teachers, parents, tutors and students.

This book is divided into levels, and everything is taught systematically.  The workbook pages are fun for kids to do, and the organizational system helps teachers, tutors and parents know how to guide kids.  If a child is having difficulty with a concept, the parent or teacher will know to go back a level and remediate before proceeding.

> Teachers can use the book for whole-class lessons or to teach small groups.  The scaffolded, leveled system makes it easy to manage many students working on different skills.
> Parents can buy the workbook for use at home.  Kids can do most of the work on their own.  The leveled system makes it easy for a parent or tutor to review a lesson—or teach the next step in acquiring new skills.
> Tutors can use the book to identify gaps in a child’s learning.  Simply proceed through the levels and slow down when a concept seems difficult.  The book lays out a great tutoring program for helping elementary school students.
> Home school parents will appreciate the comprehensive nature of the book, the word problems, and the scaffolded approach to learning.

The workbook contains 260 pages filled with worksheets for skill development, word problems, long multiplication mastery, standardized test practice questions and strategies — everything needed to succeed in learning to multiply. 

A student who masters multiplication is ready to take on all the other mathematics challenges in elementary school!

The Math Worksheet Generator (math-aids.com) is an awesome FREE site!  Parents and teachers should know about it.  It’s beyond awesome.  It’s great that you can generate worksheets for basic facts practice…but the awesomeness extends far beyond that.

I will definitely be telling my fifth and sixth grade colleagues about the PEMDAS worksheets.  I didn’t learn about the order of operations until junior high (in an advanced class), but now the Department of Education thinks that 10 year olds can do it.  Now we teach fifth-graders how to do PEMDAS: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.  As you can imagine, the kids need tons of practice.  Once they understand the concept, they can’t get enough PEMDAS worksheets!  It’s really fun to do big kid math.

The math worksheet generator has a great section on rounding.  Rounding is an extremely difficult concept for children.  Many students struggle with it all through elementary school.  Kids can’t get enough rounding practice.  Teachers will be glad to have great worksheets that provide this practice.

The kindergarten section is wonderful.  It can be tricky to find good practice for kindergartners, and this site certainly delivers.  At home, the kindergarten worksheets would be great for older siblings to use when they’re playing school with younger siblings.

I could go on and on about the sections on money, graphing, time, measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode), exponents, ratios, fractions, and more…but I think it’s really time you stop listening to me and go visit the Math Worksheet Generator!

Teachers, students, parents—you can download a FREE* computer program, Best Addition Practice EVER!  to help kids study their basic addition facts.  (*Free for non-commercial use — it was designed for home and classroom use; it’s available for PC only,  Windows XP or newer.)  Click here to look at screenshots and detailed descriptions about the program.

Best Addition Practice EVER!  really is the best.  The program is simple and easy to use.  It’s customizable, letting kids teach themselves addition facts, practice, and test themselves.

Teaching Tips, a button on the screen, explains how you can show your students to use the program to teach themselves, then test their progress.

For example, beginning students can practice with adding 0 and 1 to the numbers 0-12.  Students could also choose to practice adding only 0 through 5.  Students who think they really know their addition can select all numbers and test themselves on all 169 facts.

Students can practice with facts that give them trouble.  Many students struggle with adding 9.   Students can start by adding 9 to 0, 1 and 10.  Then they can add an additional fact, while constantly reviewing what they already know.

My dad wrote a version of this program for my younger brother and sister years ago.   I have used it in my classroom for several years.  Students from my class—and others—love to use it for practice.  It works like magic!

Best Addition Practice EVER! complements my new CD, Best Multiplication Songs EVER!   It features simple lyrics and tunes you know.  The songs help kids learn their times tables quickly and permanently.

Give them a listen!

Best Multiplication Songs EVER!  is available for purchase at Abligio.com.  If your school is interested in buying multiple copies, contact Abligio Books for a special school rate.

I hope that Best Addition Practice EVER! and Best Multiplication Songs EVER!  help your students as much as they have helped mine.

Many states require that all educational posters in the classroom be removed or covered during testing week.  Removing all the posters makes for a bare, depressing room.  If you use dark paper to cover your educational posters, you will be amazed at how much light is sucked from the room.

Instead, make AWESOME posters to cover your educational posters and charts!

Have students use construction paper or butcher paper to create inspirational signs.  They might say “Rock the Test” or “Go, Us!”  After school, hang the posters up.  This way, kids are excited for testing day because they get to see how AWESOME the room looks!  During the test, students will remember the fun they had creating the signs and feel a little better.

I like to use pink paper because the color pink is calming.  Explain to your students that they can look at the pink if they feel test anxiety.  Pink has the added bonus of reflecting the light and casting a warm glow over the room.

Make testing week even more AWESOME by creating a theme.  I like Rocky Balboa.  My kids make posters that say “Go the distance” and “Eye of the Tiger.”  On test day, we get revved up with Eye Of The Tiger and dance a little.  Then we  calm down with Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky).  The theme songs stick in kids’ heads, giving them a comforting thought during the test.