The first day of school approaches. Sharpened pencils, neatly stacked book, organized files, and alphabetically arranged encyclopedias grace your classroom. Everything is clean, shiny, and waiting. I picture you standing at your...
Photo by Ulises Baga on Unsplash The school board asked if you would be their first-grade teacher, and you said “yes”. Congratulations! An exciting journey lies before you. Perhaps you always wanted to teach and now you finally...
Recess. Do you rejoice? Moan? Feel uncertain? Yes, I have been there too. Recess is designed to give students a break from study, and a chance to exercise. Our little people's minds are working quite hard, and they deserve a...
To Lack Nothing: Why Practice and Teach Spiritual Disciplines?
How about if the spiritual disciplines were like teaching academic material? After each lesson, you can stop and ask your students, "Now, what did you just learn?" And at least on the good days, they can give a response with a...
Be Sensational: Engaging the Senses to Stimulate Learning
Ruth Anna: Be sensational. Ruth Anna: Our kindergarten and first grade students come into our classroom and they have learned about the world primarily through touching, tasting, through experiences. Suddenly they are supposed to...
The Exciting Journey: Guiding Your Class to Successful Reading
Glenda Miller: Welcome to the exciting adventures of first grade. This is one of Debbie Duck's offspring. A couple of years ago I found this huge Debbie Duck to go with the CLE rhymes. Ruth Anna Kuhns : We want to spend some time...
Show Me a Way to Make Eleven: How I Teach Math with Rekenreks
Ruth Anna: I'm going to give all of you a rekenrek and then we're going to talk about a few things. Ruth Anna: Are you ready? So am I. Ruth Anna: When you get rekenrek, I want you to push all of your beads to the right. And I...
Helping Students Grasp a Concept with Air Punctuation
One of my frustrations over the years has been teaching punctuation when I feel like I remind my students again and again to end their sentences with periods, to start their sentences with capital letters. And I learned about air...
Remember Connor*, the student who gave me a beautiful package of chocolate one morning? This chocolate was only one of the grace moments listed in my last post . But let me tell you about Connor and why his gift was significant....
Making Elementary Math Come Alive: Rekenreks and Read-Alouds
How can you help your elementary students master the abstract concepts of math? In these two videos, Ruth Anna Kuhns describes two ways to help students visualize math, and make connections: rekenreks and read-alouds. Rekenreks...
Seventeen energetic children entered my classroom door on the first day of school. Bright-eyed. Eager. I smiled. Only five new students this year. Settling into a routine should be quick and easy. I was wrong. In the first six...
Two plus two is not five? That's so obvious! For our students who struggle with math computation, however, this is not so easy. My first blog post introduced Rekenreks , a great resource for your first grade math class. Today I...
Last year, I was introduced to the book Number Talks: Helping Children Build Mental Math and Computation Skills by Sherry Parrish. While this book has many ideas for helping your students learn number sense, I want to highlight...
