Student data tracking helps drive instructional decisions. I’ve been using daily exit tickets for years, and they would help me decide if I needed to reteach a skill, but I wasn’t tracking the data in a way that motivated my students and doing it daily seemed impossible when I tried. This year I have a system that I have managed to tweak, maintain, and really push my students and ...
Ideas for Organizing Math Intervention
If you are a classroom teacher, then you are probably very familiar with documenting student data and progress. Documenting the differentiation you are providing for every single student while also teaching said students can feel impossible. Hopefully, these tips for organizing your math intervention documentation will make it all more manageable. Plus, there are a few freebies to get ...
5 Ideas for Teaching Surface Area
Surface Area is the amount of space covering the outside of a 3D shape. This math concept allows students to visualize and is concrete, but that doesn’t mean all students will immediately excel. Let’s talk about some of our best tips for teaching surface area of prisms, cylinders, and pyramids. Standards Let’s start with the standards. While surface area is covered in 8th CCSS, it ...
Utilizing Our STAAR Question Bank
STAAR is a registered trademark of the Texas Education Agency. Maneuvering the Middle® is not affiliated with or sponsored by the Texas Education Agency or the State of Texas. For Texas Teachers The STAAR (State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness) is moving online with a variety of new open-ended question types. Maneuvering the Middle has designed a bank of questions to ...
TEA STAAR Redesign
STAAR is a registered trademark of the Texas Education Agency. Maneuvering the Middle® is not affiliated with or sponsored by the Texas Education Agency or the State of Texas. For Texas Teachers If you teach middle school math in the great state of Texas, then this is for you! The STAAR (State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness) has made some pretty significant changes ...
Pi Day Activities
Pi Day (3.14 - March 14) is on a Tuesday in 2023. Embrace the chance to celebrate this mathematical holiday by circling back (see what I did there?) to these FREE activities for your students! We are happy to share that we have the perfect FREE activities (that’s right, plural!) for your students! Download your free resources below and read our best tips on teaching ...
4 Ways to Make Math Relevant
We encounter math on a daily basis, but it can be a challenge for students to connect what they learn in class to the outside world. Here are 4 (update: 5!) ways teachers can engage students by making math relevant to their lives. LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCAST | SPOTIFY 1. Share Your Enthusiasm The key to modeling what it looks like to be a math person is to share your excitement! ...
Factoring Polynomials with Special Cases
If you haven’t had a chance to read part 1 Teaching Factoring Trinomials, then go back and do that before reading anymore. Today we are going to discuss Factoring Polynomials with special cases. Factoring Trinomials When A>1 I hesitated to put a>1 in this blog post since it isn’t necessarily a special case, but I considered that you probably would teach this AFTER you teach ...
Teaching Factoring Trinomials
Factoring trinomials relies on many prerequisite skills (distributing, multiplying polynomials, finding a greatest common factor, exponent rules, and integer operations… I’m sure there are more). It also sets the stage for future success in solving quadratic equations and graphing quadratic functions. This makes factoring polynomials so important for students to conquer. As a student, ...
15 Creative Incentives for Middle School
Incentives for middle school are vital for your classroom! In the early months of my first year of teaching, class periods competed for points that were awarded based on seamless transitions, highest test averages, and being on task. While my students were working on earning points, I had learned that the cupcake reward was not feasible due to a school policy. *Cue palm to ...