Teaching Length, Mass and Capacity with Teaching Measures

 Thanks to Scott @ www.mytopten.com.au

Are you after an interactive and independent learning item for length, mass and capacity? Here it is. Teaching measures has developed this great interactive page with dozens of links to interactive games. Each of the activities has a worksheet to accompany it, so if your looking for reinforcement and practise, this site is it.

Visit Teaching Measures

Bring Geometry to life for your students with 3D Vinci

What is it: Having just finished teaching a session on Geometry with my kids I really wish I had seen this earlier.  3DVinci integrates all those boring geometric and mathematical concepts into Google Sketchup and allows them to build houses and other objects integrating scale, ratio and a range of geometric concepts., create printable nets to produce 3D shapes to display in the classroom.

How can i use this in the classroom: 3Dvinci is full of geometry lessons aimed at all year levels and has video tutorials for each session so there is no need to be a genius at Sketchup by any means. These videos show SketchUp in action. See how to tile, tessellate, divide a cube, build a prism, put together an icosahedron, and more.

Download a fun project each month that uses SketchUp to demonstrate a geometric concept. Printable PDF format, separate versions for teachers and students.

If you are new to SketchUp? This teacher page has easy steps to get started, and links to some free student activities including mosaics and puzzles.

3DVinci's Getting Started Guide (PDF) takes you through SketchUp's basic tools and features. Click either PC version or Mac version.

This one is definitely worth integrating into your maths sessions especially if you have kids in grade 3 and above and along the way you will see what else you can do with Google Sketchup too.  Let me know how you go.

Lesson Plan: Creating a Pictograph

Welcome to the first of many video tutorials.  I have deliberately kept this weeks very simple as I am trying to learn some new technology myself.  Pictographs are a great maths lesson for junior students to explore graphing and data in the early years of schooling.  This video tutorial below explains all the steps to get you and your students to produce a pictograph in no time. The aim of these video tutorials is that you can sit back and learn alongside your students.  Enjoy and feedback is always appreciated.

Excellent web based generator for teachers and students

Create a Graph is very simple to use web based Graph Generator that I can highly recommend for younger students who may find a spreadsheet such as Excel a little daunting.  A very simple interface lets you select from Bar, Line, X&Y, Area and Pie graphs and takes you through each stage of the graph making process in simple to understand language.

There are examples and tutorials, not that you will need them and you can output graphs as either a traditional paper based printout or get a hyperlink to view your graph online.

Be sure to take a look at Create a Graph next time you are doing a statistics and data lesson with your kids and want to generate a graph simply whilst teaching your kids the steps required along the way.It's free of course with no sign up required and there are a few other useful tools to be found on this site also.

By the way if you are looking for a great lesson plan on Creating Pictographs on Computer with younger students.  Here is one from my lesson plan section.