One of the yearly activities I look forward to at my school is our annual Pinwheels for Peace celebration. Pinwheels for Peace is a school-wide, cross-curricular project that occurs every September. At my school, the project is headed up by by my super-talented, award-winning art teacher neighbor, Shelley Self. September 21st is International Day of …
Holidays
This Pi Day Dice Challenge was inspired by a twitter post from Texas Math Teacher. I created a free downloadable template that can be used to host a Pi Day Dice Challenge Tournament in your own classroom. Just add dice! I decided to take the idea and run with it. I created a template to …
Last month, I tried out a Valentine’s Jamboard Activity with all of my classes to help show appreciation to the various teachers/school employees in our building. We did this on a Friday after a week of being digital due to the ice/snowpocalypse. I thought it would be a nice change of pace from our daily …
I have a new original puzzle to share with you today. I don’t know what it is about the holiday season that gets me in the Christmas puzzle creating mood (remember my Decorate the Tree Puzzle from a few years ago?), but I’m back at it today with what I’m calling the Checkered Ornament Puzzle. …
I’m excited to share the Only Takes and Adds Puzzle with you today. I did a lot of thinking this summer about how I wanted to incorporate puzzles into my classroom this year. Over the last few years, puzzles are one of the things I’ve become known for sharing on my blog. Hello, I have an …
Looking for fun and creative pi day activities? Check out this comprehensive list of free ideas and activities for celebrating pi day from those who best know how to celebrate this most mathematical of holidays – math teachers! Pi Day Decorations Pi Clock Poster Add a bit of Pi Day fun to your classroom with …
Over the years, I’ve shared quite a few Christmas ideas in my Monday Must Reads posts. This year, I’ve taken the time to go through these posts and compile these holiday-themed ideas in a single post. Hopefully this will make accessing these amazing ideas that other math teachers have shared on twitter even easier to …
The 3 Hares Puzzle is a classic brain teaser that will put your visual problem-solving skills to the test. Can you arrange the six pieces so that every hare has exactly two ears?
I’m currently procrastinating on preparing a presentation I will be giving this next Wednesday at the Northeast Oklahoma Math Teachers Gathering by writing this post about the Square Pi Puzzle. Speaking of which, if you are anywhere near Northeast Oklahoma and are free on July 31st, consider yourself invited! It’s a completely free day of …
It’s the last day of the semester before Christmas Break. This means that my day pretty much consists of waiting impatiently for students to take their semester tests followed by a frenzy of grading to get the tests into the gradebook. The Math Vocabulary Christmas Ornament Project We’re on a block schedule for our two …
Looking for funny and creative teacher superlatives for the yearbook? Check out this list of 30 teacher award ideas with free printable certificates that can be used for Teacher Appreciation Week. Teacher Superlative Ideas These teacher superlatives (or faculty) will work for both middle school and high school teachers. I have personally used these teacher …
It’s quite a bit past Easter now, but you could still use this multiplying polynomials egg hunt activity if you don’t care about being relevant to a current holiday. 🙂 A few years ago, I picked up a bag of Easter eggs at a garage sale. I didn’t know exactly what I planned on using …
Engage your students with this tangram-inspired Egg of Columbus Puzzle! Discover a fun and challenging way to enhance problem-solving skills in your math classroom.
Today I’m sharing the Cover the Heart Puzzle with you. It’s time to update y’all about the happenings of one of my favorite places in my classroom – the puzzle table. Even though Valentine’s Day was LAST week, I’ve got a bit of a Valentine/Heart themed puzzle out for my students to tackle this week. …
My chemistry students requested that we do something fun for Valentine’s Day. We haven’t done a lab in a while, so I put together a Conversation Hearts Lab. I saw that you could do the standard Dancing Raisins activity with conversation hearts, so I decided to try it out. It turns out I should have …
The goal of the Silhouettes Puzzle is to place as many of the octagons as needed on top of one another so that the silhouette of one of the rabbits below appears. I was first introduced to the Silhouettes Puzzle when I saw a tweet that featured the puzzle at a science museum. I retweeted …
This year, I decided to have my students complete a special Valentine’s project. I realized a few weeks ago that this is the first year since I started teaching where I forgot (oops!) to have my students celebrate National Letter Writing Week in January. To make up for it, I decided to have my students …
This week’s puzzle on the puzzle table is a duck-themed shape fitting puzzle that I am calling “Cover the Duck.” I didn’t really plan it this way, but this is the second week in a row where the puzzle table featured a duck-themed puzzle. Last week, my students tackled a puzzled called Ducks and Snakes. …
Today I’m sharing my first ever original puzzle. I’m calling it the Decorate the Tree Puzzle. It’s officially the first day of Christmas Break here in the Carter household. So far, I’ve celebrated by doing the standard dishes and laundry, watching a Christmas movie as well as silly get out of debt reality shows on …
I created these free printable Thanksgiving thank you notes so my students could get in the Thanksgiving spirit by telling someone at our school “Thanks!”. There are six designs. I print them on colored copy paper and cut them in half. Students then fold them in half to make a cute little thank you card. …
Before I share the chromatography butterflies bulletin board that my chemistry students created, I should make it clear that I’m teaching chemistry this year under some not-so-normal circumstances. I still want to keep my chemistry class as hands-on as possible. This has meant that I have to get creative to find lab activities that my …
Depending on where you are located, teacher appreciation week was either this past week or the week before last. Throughout both weeks, my twitter feed was filled with pictures of gift after gift that other teachers had received. There were pictures of awesome looking food spreads provided by PTOs or other organizations. If this were …
Today I want to share with you this Square Pi Day Puzzle. Since this next week is spring break, my students and I celebrated an early Pi Day on Friday, March 10th. Most of the activities we did were my usual “go-to” pi day activities. We had a contest to see who could memorize the …
What do you do on the last couple of days of school when semester tests are already finished? You have students draw on top of their heads. Confused? Let me explain. Last week, I was scrolling through Facebook, and I saw that someone had shared a “fun Christmas game.” I guess it caught my eye …
Looking for a fun game to give your algebra students practice writing linear equations from a graph? Check out this Turkeys in the Oven Game. If it’s not Thanksgiving, feel free to change the theme to something more seasonally appropriate! Last Friday, I decided my Algebra 1 students needed a day of reviewing calculating slope …