A Year of Math...

This year, a lot has changed in my teaching career and I'm very excited about the new change.  I've gone from being a first grade teacher with my main focus being on reading intervention into a 2nd-5th grade special educator (at the same school) with my main focus being math.  This is a learning curve and a welcome challenge for me, as I'm much more comfortable with reading, but sometimes stepping outside of your comfort zone and bubble is just what is needed.  I'm learning and figuring out all new ways to teach math to students with special needs and taking it all one step at a time.  Things are much different this year then they have been for the past 8 years in many ways, but this change and challenge was just what I needed.

Through the help of donors choose, I'm quickly increasing my library of math supplies and creating a welcoming math classroom for my students.  I work with four different amazing teachers every day and am constantly creating and modifying new materials for my students and teachers to use to help my students become the best mathematicians they can be.

One such product that I've created are my Story Problem Rubrics.  We use Investigations as our main math curriculum in grades 1-4 and so there are a lot of story problems (or word problems) that the students are constantly working on.  We've tried to remind the students to always show their work, but it doesn't always stick with them.  So, I've created these rubrics to help all of our students remember all of the steps that they need to include when working on story problems.  Some of the students have them laminated in their folders or math bins so that they can pull them out and use them whenever they are working on story problems.  This has really helped our students know what is expected of them and has helped them be able to remember to show all of their work (this is a huge part of our curriculum and sometimes hard for my students with special needs).  Feel free to check them out at my teachers pay teachers page.