Transformations on Your SMARTBoard

The word transform means "to change." In geometry, a transformation changes the position of a shape on a coordinate plane. Teach your students how to visualize the moving of a shape from one position to another with the Transformations Whiteboard Teacher Pack. Appropriate for grades 4 - 8, you can use the Flash mini-movies to teach students how to:

• Predict and describe positions and orientations of two-dimensional shapes after transformations such as reflections, rotations, and translations.
• Draw the results of translations, reflections, and rotations of objects in the coordinate plane, and determine properties that remain fixed.

The teacher pack includes the following:

• 12 Flash mini-movies including the Alphabet Symmetry Tool Virtual Manipulative.
• A Printable Teacher Guide
• Printable Assessments

Learn more about the Transformations Teacher Pack

eBooks Could Spur Kids' Interest in Reading

Innovative educators who want to incorporate eBooks into their instruction when they are teaching the literary classics have a number of free online resources at their disposal. A few websites specialize in providing free downloads of eBooks, and classic literature is particularly prevalent because the copyright on such books has long ago expired. Students can be given the option of reading the books at home online, and forgetful students will never again have the excuse that they forgot their book in their lockers. Numerous classic titles are available online and students have access to them wherever they have an Internet connection, even on handheld devices and e-readers like the Nook and Kindle.

One site dedicated to providing free eBooks is Planet eBook, which provides numerous titles in classic literature online as free downloads. Titles include many that are commonly taught in the classroom and assigned as reading outside the classroom, such as A Tale of Two Cities, Gulliver's Travels, Les Miserables, and The Great Gatsby. The site allows you to sign up for a newsletter that lets you know when new titles are available. If anything else, you can use the site as a creative way of coming up with extra credit assignments for students.

Another great site is Project Gutenberg, which has more than 33,000 free eBooks available to teachers or anyone else for that matter. The site allows teachers to search by title or author. Among the most popular titles are: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Paradise Lost and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Project Gutenberg allows users to download in six different formats, such as HTML, Kindle or plain text. A limited number of audio books are also available through this site.

Finally, another site you can use to look for eBooks not only in classic literature, but also in a number of other topics is E-Books Directory. If you look under the children's category, you will see numerous titles available for free download, including Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Call of the Wild and Jungle Book. Under literature & fiction category are more titles for older readers, such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. There are also descriptions of each book posted under each title listed on this site.

This guest post is contributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the topics of online courses. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.

Smartboard Activities | Online Student Activities | Virtual Manipulatives

Old Dogs, New Math: Homework Help for Puzzled Parents

I love math, but I haven’t always. For all the years of my life preceding my education as a teacher, I despised the subject. The rules, equations, and abstract concepts had little meaning to me and were sometimes beyond my comprehension. It wasn’t until I started my training as a teacher that I began to look at math differently. In my classes, I relearned many of the concepts that I found so unappealing through activities that brought them to life. I was taught to understand what I was learning so that I could later pass that understanding on to my students.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to learn math in this way does not exist for the parents of many children. Until now that is. Old Dogs, New Math: Homework Help for Puzzled Parents is a wonderful resource for parents struggling to find ways to help their children with the math they’re expected to learn at school. This book offers a short course on the concepts taught in today’s elementary schools and does so in a way that brings parents up to date on many of the new techniques teachers use to teach them. I have to admit that as a fifth grade teacher I was surprised (and excited!) to see so many of the strategies that I have used time and again in my classroom (and many more that I haven’t used but will soon!).

Do not confuse this book with a boring survey of math though; each chapter is full of engaging text, pictures and diagrams, sample questions, and engaging math games. One of the book’s best features is its emphasis on understanding the mistakes that kids make on their math homework. In each chapter, parents learn the common challenges that kids have with specific concepts and can even see real mistakes that they make in solving certain problems.

Old Dogs is a very worthwhile read and a handy book to keep around until the last of your children heads off to middle school. It does for parents what my training in education did for me—take the fear and loathing out of math and make it an enjoyable subject.

SMARTBoard Mini-Movies - $0.99 through Thanksgiving!