Engaging struggling students is a important and productive undertaking in every classroom. I am excited to share with you today a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) lesson that connects to the language arts curriculum. I designed this STEM lesson plan template that students will love, based on “The Three Little Pigs” fairy tale. 

Coordinate plane activities are fun for students. I find that they enjoy the visual aspect of identifying coordinates and creating shapes using those coordinates. In this post I will be sharing three coordinate plane activities that focus on coordinate plane word problems from the Progress in Mathematics series for Grades 5 and 6.

In this post, I share a great line plot activity for late elementary or middle school students. I highly recommend this line plot worksheet because it brings together several topics in one activity. Students use their developing knowledge of fractions, (halves, quarters, eighths), hone their ability to measure objects, and practice displaying and analyzing data using line plots. You can download the line plot worksheet and use it in your classroom today.

If you are like me, you are wracking your brain for a holiday-themed STEAM activity for your class. There are several possibilities for non-religious themes. I have looked through many of the ideas: cutting out snowflakes, decorating trees, making paper strip stars, etc., but the one I like the best is constructing a gingerbread house out of graham crackers. Gingerbread houses are part of many holiday traditions and associated with winter, so it is a reasonably safe choice for most classes.

I wanted to share with you today some ideas about creating the scale on a bar graph for Grade 3 and Grade 4. The download for this post is a tip sheet from the Progress in Mathematics math series that teachers can use to help guide students as they learn to create a non-unit scale on a bar graph starting with a tally table. If you are using the Progress in Mathematics series, this activity would be useful in Grade 3, Chapter 7 with lesson 2 and 3, and for Grade 4, Chapter 7 with lessons 1 to 3.

At the beginning of the year I gave my fourth grade students a pre-test, which assessed the prerequisite skills necessary for students to be successful in math this year. Many of the questions on the test focused on solving word problems involving money, a concept many students have difficulty with. This year was no different; many of my students had difficulty with computations involving money. Student were able to identify coins and bills, but struggled to compute with money amounts.