It's time! Teachers all over the country are thinking about back to school. Whether you are going back to school this week, next week or not until the end of the month, I am sure your mind is on back to school. My math blogger friends and I have teamed up to bring you our best tips for back to school. Check out my tips below for organizing your online resources, enter my giveaway and be sure to check out the other back to school tips.Organizing Online Resources
I love starting the new school year with everything organized and ready to go. It is the time of the year that I feel like I have everything in its place. I am a math teacher who uses many games for practice and for differentiation so naturally I have a lot bins full of manipulatives, game pieces, card decks and dice. As the years have progressed and online math games have developed, I have added them to my repertoire but have always struggled with how to keep these resources organized in a way that made them easy for my students to find. For every good math resource available online, there are 3 bad ones and I really wanted a place to organize the good resources for each unit where my students could find them.
At the beginning of last school year, I decided to get my online math resources organized in a way that made them easy for my students (and me!) to find and use at school and at home. I decided to create a classroom blog that linked to all my favorite online resources. I went with a blogger blog because it is easy to use and my school already uses google email and other products. It is super easy (and free!) to set up a blogger blog.
Because I teach multiple grades, I decided to create a page on my blog for each one. On the home page, I added a little welcome message and directed students to click on the tab for their grade across the top of the page. I work with 7 grades but decided to start with 4 grades for the first year. If you are a classroom teacher, you can create a page for each content area. If you want to start small, just create one page for one subject and add more as you get comfortable.
When kids clicked on their grade, they were taken to a page that had resources on it that went with their current unit of study. They were a mixture of online games, you tube songs and math literature book read alouds. It takes just a few minutes to learn how to add links and embed you tube videos in your blog posts.
Here is an example of what was on the grade 2 page when we were working on telling time
Having my favorite online resources in one place where kids could access them from home or school was fantastic. I probably spent less than 15 minutes a week keeping my pages up to date with what we were working on. If you are new to blogging, it will definitely take you longer when you start out but it is certainly a skill worth learning. Having your favorite online resources organized when the school year starts will certainly help to make this the best year ever! If you have other tips for keeping online resources organized, be sure to share them in the comments below!
The TPT Back to school sale will take place Monday and Tuesday August 1st & 2nd! All of my resources will be 28% off with the code BESTYEAR.
The TPT Back to school sale will take place Monday and Tuesday August 1st & 2nd! All of my resources will be 28% off with the code BESTYEAR.
Want some extra money to spend during the back to school sale? Enter the giveaway below. I will choose a winner early Tuesday morning and email the gift card to the winner so they will have it to spend during day 2 of the sale!
Check out some other great back to school math tips!