Our school system in New Zealand means you need to be a good all round teacher as we teach all subjects until students are 12 years old. So while I love literacy and reading and making reading enjoyable for students, for me Maths is where it is at.
I love finding ways that will help students understand and make sense of a concept for themselves so it goes beyond being able to do it to understanding what they are doing and why.
The blogging world and Pinterest has been an amazing source of inspiration and learning, and sometimes I feel like I learn more from them than I have from my lecturers at being able to engage and assist students in their learning journey.
One of the things that has inspired me is the resources that other teachers have created to use within their classrooms (many of which are on my wish list for when I finally have my own classroom) and the fact they put their hard work out their for others to use.
It has lead to me starting to create my own resources. I already have a list a mile long but have only managed to create one - Fact Families up to 20. Using clip art from the wonderful MelonHeadz as my base I created 42 slides worth of facts with a cute little girl from Educlips and fonts from KG Fonts.
What surprised me was the amount of work involved to make them and include all the facts from 2 to 20. This only made me appreciate even more the hard work the wonderful people on TPT have done!!
They are non themed so that it does not matter when I get to teach them with my relieving work.
I wanted to make this first as a lot of the relieving work that I am getting is in the junior classrooms and you can never practice these facts enough. Helping them understand the multiple ways you can make a number and the commutative property of how if 2 + 3 = 5 then 3 + 2 = 5 and then to switch it around to know the subtraction properties is big in developing their foundation for all their future learning. It is also one that I keep finding again and again that students do not know as quick knowledge, so I also want to build on this with more stuff for my tool box.
Of course now it requires the expense of printing them and laminating so they can be used again and again.
It makes me silly happy to have been able to do this, even though they are only for me :) as I can not see anyone else being interested in them.
No comments