Your Options When Hands-On Learning is Overwhelming and Focussed Practice is Required

Today's mathematics is hands-on. This approach to teaching math puts math in context, makes it relevant, promotes problem-solving, creativity, co-operartion, analytical skills, and so much more.

It's wonderful to see such a dynamcic approach to mathematics, but to a student who is struggling specific skills, concepts, and processes, it can be overwhelming to be working on an activity that draws upon so many skills simultaneously.  Sometimes, focussed practice and practical application is what is needed.

If as student does not have a handle on a specific skill, it can make tackling other more encompassing projects frustrating and overwhelming.  Unfortunately, finding quality resources to practice these skills can be difficult. 

Some teachers rely on worksheets found as a result of a google search of the concept or skill, but they are often poorly designed.  The space to complete the work can be insufficient, they tend to be visually unappealing, and rarely include any application questions.

I have created many of my own resources and worksheets to practice specific skills, but I also use the Spectrum Math Series.   It's well-organized making it easy for teachers to pick out pages that cover the specific skills they would like to see a student practice, and builds on that practice with application questions that tie-in very well to the practice pages; there are no surprises for the student when they tackle the application questions.

The Spectrum Math Series covers all elementary grades from K to grade 8, and includes practice on skills such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of whole numbers, fractions, and decimals, percent, geometry, volume, statistics and probability, and more.  Each topic has a pretest followed by progressive excersizes with ample practice, and problem-solving/application questions. 

It's a great resource to have on hand to use as needed when extra practice is needed, reinforcement, or review.

Grade 3
Grade 6

Teaching Empathy: Thoughts and Ideas

Teaching empathy and sympathy is not something that can be taught from textbooks.  

That said, they remain qualities that teachers foster in their students... 

...when given the time and opportunity, that is. 

Often the focus in the classroom is on curriculum:  Math, science, reading, and writing.  Rarely does a teacher include in her daily plans time set aside for the practice of empathy.  (Whether it should be part of the daily plans is another debate entirely!).  That said, fostering empathy within our students likely happens incidentally several times a day.

In fact, we are doing it whether we want to or not; in the way we handle conflicts between students, handle a descrepnancy between performance and expectation, or even simply by the way we listen to our students when they share news or their thoughts on something. 
I am a strong believer that when it comes to fostering traits and qualities such as empathy, sympathy, compassion, and others, my role is secondary to that of parents.  

Opportunities within the classroom, however, can give further practice, additional challenges and pressures in applying those traits and qualities, and possibly a different perspective should a classmate or teacher practice the trait differently, apply it differently, or place a different value on it. 

Like the vast majority of teachers, I never included the practice of empathy as part of any lesson plan.  However, if given the opportunity, I would go beyond the incidental learning opportunities and allow my students ample, diliberate, and conscious practice of empathy and other traits and virtues.

By this I mean that I would make an attempt to point out and label empathetic behaviour in myself and in my students during the regular goings-on within the classroom and my students' day.  I might also open a discussion on what "empathy" means, what it looks like, and what it feels like to give and recieve it.  I might find a children's book in which empathy is a theme and read it to my class. 

And finally, I might give them homework to find an example of empathy being practiced in their own lives outside of the classroom walls, or to identifiy or create their own opportunity to practice empathy in their own homes or other community of which they are a part. 

Opportunities to Practice Empathy

One such opportunity might be for the children to write encouraging letters to children their own age who are fighting cancer (see KidsUniteToFight).  This is an initiative of C.O.L.E's foundation; an organization started by Moireen and Aaron Ruotsala after their 3-year-old son died of a rare form of cancer as a means of providing much-needed outreach and support for children and families facing a similar battle. 

Managing Your Inbox

Teaching is a juggling act and there is bound to be a ball or two that get dropped.  For me, the one thing that always got neglected was my e-mail inbox. 

Rarely did I have a chance to check it, and rarer still did I have a chance to act on the e-mails.  Newsletters from various organizations piled up unread, questions from parents got answered if they were able to catch up with me before or after school, and requests and to do's from my Director seemed to get lost somewhere in the shuffle.

An article I read recently has completely revamped how I handle e-mail, and it's made me more productive and less stressed.  I am a visual person and it was incredibly overwhelming to open my inbox to find a 100 messages there.  That amounts to 100 things I was supposed act on that I knew I was going to be able to get to.

Now that I am consistently putting into practice the tips in this article I do not have an inbox with an overwhelming number of messages, and I've been able to prioritize better, filing newsletters away in folders with subject lines that accurately describe the contents so that I can access it when I need it, rather than feeling like I had to read it now, relevant or not. 

If you are overwhelmed by your inbox here is the article that helped me:  Is it time for an inbox detox? 

Other resources include:

Inbox Detox E-Book

E-mail Assessment Quiz