#aprilblogaday Spring Planning

Spring Break 2015!  Woo hooo!  After a lovely holiday with my family and getting to really know and love our new puppy, I have only two thoughts on my mind... Spring cleaning and spring planning for the rest of the school year.  The nice thing is both are great distractions from each other.  When I don't feel like cleaning I sit down and plan, when I'm burned out from sitting at the computer I go back to cleaning.

I'm amazed at how fast this year is going and I know that once we go back it is going to FLY.  We have our 4th benchmarks on the 20th and then EOY Parcc the second week of May.  After that it's going to be crazy trying to keep the kids engaged.   I am hoping to use games and projects to end the year. So for the rest of this week I will blog about resources or ideas I have for accomplishing this!

I'll start off with my plan for 5th...a few years ago I won a classroom set of Hands On Equations.  I am excited to use this whole program from start to finish.  When I tried to use it with 7th grade it was already too late.  I really feel that this system works best with students who have not had a lot of formal practice solving equations.  

I am really excited to introduce this to my students and follow it trough the program as written.  I am also going to look into purchasing the second set of books, solving word problems with the set.  I'm already thinking about how the next year when students are 6th graders it will be easy to refer back to the sets so they can make connections.