Skip to main content

Page Numbering

You would think that page numbering would be pretty easy (that was what I thought at least). I messed that up my first year and learned from my mistake!

How did I mess up something as simple as page numbering?!?! Easy...I had my middle schoolers number ALL the pages at the start of the year (basically 50 pages a day....most composition books are 200 pages). Well...if they messed up at page 20 forget it they were messed up for the rest of the year. It doesn't matter how much you model it or how slowly you work through the numbering SOMEONE is going to mess up (sigh!).

The pages start at the very first page (1) and then at the top of each page, which (if done correctly) would work out to be even numbers on the left and odd numbers on the right. This helps some students self check but most students are moving at warp speed once they get the hang of it and rarely self check!

What worked better for me this year was to have the students number up to page 25 and we did it togther...with me saying (repeatedly), "Make sure you haven't skipped pages" or "Make sure even numbers are on the left and odd numbers are on the right." If a student makes a mistake it is not too difficult to erase and redo when we are only talking about 25 pages.

We didn't do the next 25 until we were close to finishing adding content to the first 25 pages. Then I would do a repeat of above (walking students through all the steps of numbering). If a student really messed up their numbering they could start fresh in the second round of numbering.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more