Opinion: Math scares your child's elementary school teacher — and that should frighten you American students remain stumped by math. The 2019 scores for the National Assessment of Educational Progress test — known as NAEP — were published last month, showing that performance for fourth- and eighth-graders hasn’t budged since 2009. That’s a year after the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, convened by President George W. Bush, concluded that American math achievement was “mediocre.” The panel offered dozens of ideas for improvement, leading with the common-sense suggestion to strengthen the elementary math curriculum, which it deemed diffuse, shallow and repetitious in many schools. But improved curricula won’t help unless we acknowledge another significant problem: Many elementary teachers don’t understand math very well, and teaching it makes them anxious. Consider why American kids struggle. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel concluded U.S. students have adequate knowledge of the first two, but not the third. But does that matter? That’s understandable. Daniel T.

Would You Rather? Splat! for Google Slides - 40 Lessons - Steve Wyborney's Blog: I'm on a Learning Mission. More Free Animated Math Lessons Coming Soon! Subscribe to get the latest content by email. Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription. For my educator friends who have access to Google Slides, but do not have access to PowerPoint, this post is for you. Since Google Slides does not have the animation that makes the Splats become transparent, the Splat! The content of the lessons is the same as the original lessons. Visit these links to see the original videos about how to use the Splat! Quick Note: The file sharing power of Google Drive is impressive and highly useful. I hope you enjoy these Splats! Splat Through 10How many dots are under the Splat? SPLAT 1.1 – numbers through 10 (Google Slides compatible version)SPLAT 1.2 – numbers through 10 (Google Slides compatible version)SPLAT 1.3 – numbers through 10 (Google Slides compatible version)SPLAT 1.4 – numbers through 10 (Google Slides compatible version)SPLAT 1.5 – numbers through 10 (Google Slides compatible version)

8 Excellent Educational YouTube Channels for Today's Teachers Educational YouTube channels are built to offer modern educators tons of resources and ideas for spicing up their teaching. So many brilliant minds have given their time and energy to build some superb channels, and now we're bringing you 8 of our favourites. Which educational YouTube channels do you think our community should know about? Share them below. It's hard to beat TedEd for the best educational YouTube channels to frequent. Common Sense Education Common Sense Media have long been advocates of digital citizenship. Edutopia If you've visited Edutopia's website often, you know it's a gold mine of information for today's teachers. Big Think Big Think is a leading source of expert-driven and actionable educational content. Teaching Channel At educational YouTube channels like Teaching Channel educators can watch, share, and learn diverse techniques to help every student grow. Khan Academy You can learn anything on Khan Academy's YouTube channel. National Geographic Expert Village

The Crow and the Pitcher Rate of Change | No. 2 Pencils The Crow and the Pitcher is based on an Illuminations lesson. I used it as the introduction to linear functions to demonstrate a real-world rate of change for my students. The lesson is based on Aesop's Fable, "The Crow and the Pitcher." I borrowed graduated cylinders and beakers from the amazing science teacher on my team. Students were in groups of two to three. Students added one pebble at a time and then put a data point on their table. I like the way this group would predict how much the water level would rise before they dropped the pebble in. Once they added seven pebbles, I had them share how many it would take to get to 100 mL. Most groups' data was a rate of change of 2 mL/pebble. The Illuminations lesson continues to fill the container with more marbles to determine domain and range. Turns out, they taught me about water displacement, which they had learned in science! Save

dy/dan – less helpful See It, Build It, Check It (3-D Version) | The Robertson Program for Inquiry-based Teaching in Mathematics and Science Curriculum – Geometry and Spatial Sense Sorting and classifying 3-dimensional shapes by attributesClassifying 3-dimensional shapes by geometric propertiesDescribing location using positional languageRelating shapes to other shapes, to designs, and to figuresComposing and decomposing shapesRecognizing transformations Context Children are briefly presented with a 3-D structure made of multilink cubes and they must then re-create the structure from memory. Materials Pre-assembled figures made of multilink cubes (see photos of cube figures below)Bags of cubes (two colours) for each pair of students

iPhoneography: Photo Challenges, Ideas & Literacy I have been facilitating an iPhoneography activity for our Middle Schoolers over the past two quarters. iPhoneography is defined by Wikipedia as: Phoneography is the art of creating photos with an Apple iPhone.This is a style of mobile photography that differs from all other forms of digital photography in that images are both shot and processed on the iOS device. It does not matter whether a photo is edited using different graphics applications or not The class was 40 minutes long, which I divided into the following workflow: 10 minutes of challenge explanation20 minutes of “in the field” photography10 minutes of photoapping and sharing of final images We worked on: basic photography tips, such as contrast, brightness, depth of field and saturationphotoapping (sending one image through several apps to achieve a desired result)storytellingcommunicating via images In addition, the class discussion, activities and reflections lend themselves to: What’s next? Look on down…Feet, Feet and More Feet