I’ve decided I need to do more to help my ESL students. So decided to start with something simpler like prepositions. I made a total of 3 worksheets that help kids work on prepositions, and here’s the first.
Click here for the free printable PDF: Snowman Prepositions PDF
Need a quick review of angles, vertices, shape names, etc? Well, here’s a half sheet for you to give your students. It would be great for a math warm-up activity, since it isn’t very long.
Click here for the free math printable worksheet (PDF): Identifying Parts of Shapes
Here are some fun activities I’ve seen recently that deal with states of matter (solid, liquid, gas):
Great visual and foldable for states of matter (source)
Life cycle of a snowman (source)
Encourage kids to write journals about experiments with states of matter. This one involved observing butter and chocolate left outside in the sun (source)
Bouncing bubbles activity (source)
Here’s a practice page for reviewing/identifying parts of geometric shapes (angles, sides, vertices, parallel lines, etc). Click here for the free printable PDF: Shapes Rock
I recently read a blog post on all the fun ways you can modify tic-tac-toe to make it more educational. This idea was my favorite: Cut up an egg carton (or make your own board out of paper) and create pieces of two different colors. On each piece, write a high-frequency sight word you would like your child or class to practice. Then have the kids play the standard game with these rules:
I would make a bunch of sets for my classroom using a variety of sight words so kids can play when they finish an assignment. If you use paper (pieces and boards), laminate them so they’ll last longer. Also, to keep sets together, I’d make a blue set (using light and dark blue pieces) so the kids know all the blue pieces go together.
This game can also be played with letter names and sounds if you’re working with younger kids (preschool, kindergarten, first grade).
Are your students struggling with addition, subtraction, multiplication or division? These videos explain it in a method that may just do the trick for your confused learners:
Place Value (Number Disks With Place Value Charts) by the NY Common Core Mathematics Project
Teaching Math (Child Narrated) by Kid Snippets
For some reason, the word “antonyms” or way harder for kids to remember than “opposites.” So to teach them, I’ve made a practice game for 2 students to play. It’s like Connect Four, but kids have to supply an antonym to claim the square. Click here for the free printable worksheets:
antonyms battle
antonyms battle 2
One second grade teacher submitted this cute idea for introducing magnets and electricity:
“This is really a great way to start a unit on atoms etc. Atoms are the basics for understanding magnets and electricity. Magnets and electricity is what all our technology is based on. I’m not a scientist, but understanding that made me want to talk about atoms before we dove into magnets and electricity so that science would make sense and not just be a bunch of fun experiments, with nothing tying it all together.
This is a link for a PowerPoint story on atoms and then the song on atoms if you want to use it. The PowerPoint has the song lyrics, and then gets more detailed. I don’t use the whole thing, just parts of it.”
Squarehead Teachers 