Monday Made It – March Math Freebies!

Top of the morning, friends! Well somehow I missed the link up before it closed, but I wrote the post so I’m doing it anyway for all of my loyal (4) followers!

Spring has almost sprung here in NW Ohio as we are expected to crack 60º this week. Hooray!

I’m here to share a few things I’ve been working on lately for the March Monday Made it.

What’s that I see? Freebies ahead?

This is your lucky day. I’m giving away all sorts of Math goodies today. So, hold on to your (green) hat.

First up is my newest creation posted to TpT. My fourth graders have been working really hard on fractions so I put together a set of task cards for multiplying fractions for them to practice. Also included are 2 interactive notebook pages that I used to introduce this concept to my students. These are free for 1 week – be sure to snatch them up and share with your teacher friends.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Multiplying-Fractions-4-styles-of-practice-BONUS-interactive-notebook-page-1762735

Did I mention we’ve been studying fractions? Here’s another set of task cards for comparing fractions. Like the multiplying fractions set, they are designed to practice 4 different methods for comparing fractions.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Comparing-Fractions-Task-Cards-4-ways-to-compare-NFA1-NFA2-1713755

Have you heard of Learn Zillion?

Similar to Khan Academy, Learn Zillion is full of tons of free short instructional videos which can be used to learn Math or Language Arts skills. It’s all sorted by grade level and common core objective, so it’s easy to find just what you need.

This is a really great teacher and student resource in a lot of ways. Here are a few suggestions of how I use it:

Flipping the classroom. The videos are perfect for teachers looking to try a “flipped classroom” where students learn a concept at home and then practice the skill at school.
Absent students. Have a student that took a week long vacation to Florida or a student that misses three days with strep? Have them watch the matching videos for the lessons you taught that week on their own at home or when they come back.
Station activity. Have a group of students watch a video and then perform a task that demonstrates an understanding of the skill.
Homework. I love to have the students watch one of the videos for homework and then complete related problems. To me, it’s much easier than sending home the Math book and is a better reference tool than one or two examples of how to do a problem at the top of the page.

The product below is an independent work packet I designed to go with Learn Zillion’s 4th grade long division video set.

My one problem with Learn Zillion was that there was nothing to assess a student’s understanding of the video. There are no worksheets or online practice problems to accompany most of the videos (yet). That’s why I made these Learn Zillion packets.

Until I watched this video series, I had never even seen “the partial quotient method” for long division (shown above). If you’ve never seen it before, it’s a little hard to understand at first.

When I first saw this method demonstrated, I was very skeptical about it, but now that I’ve come to use it with my students, I see that it has some value. I still teach the standard “old fashioned” algorithm for division primarily, but I show students this method, too.

Be warned though, this method gets a strong (mostly negative) reaction from parents. Comments like, “That’s not how I learned to do it” and “Wouldn’t it be faster to do it the regular way?” are common. They don’t understand it, and it seems to be one of those hot button common core skills that parents love to post examples on Twitter with the hashtag #commoncoreproblems.

My response: #thingschangesogetusedtoit

My last freebie is something which has been free in my store for a while now. It’s one of the things that I posted to TpT as I was first learning how to use it.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Math-Madness-One-month-of-daily-4th-Grade-test-prep-review-1100284

We used this to prep our students for the OAA (Ohio Achievement Assessment) before common core came around. Most everything in this packet still correlates pretty well to common core. And, it has an editable word file if you want to add or delete questions, too. We did this as a nightly homework to provide mixed review of Math skills the students had learned up to that point.