Karen Arnold

Students are going on a ski trip! They will start with a budget, and make choices for lodging, meals, ski packages, and equipment/clothing. Students will use math skills and make ecnomic decisions with a real-life situation.

Have your students create a Report Card for any character in a book! Your students will justify grades that they would give a character. They will write areas of weakness and areas of strength for this character. This activity will also help students understand the "lingo" in their own report cards! Each specific area requires justification on page 2.

BEFORE your students read any genre, have them make meaningful predictions with this rotating activity! Students scan the selection, and choose 8 words they think will be important in the reading. They write those on squares, and then categorize them to gain understanding of possible setting, characters, problem, emotions, etc. THEN - they rotate their words and receive 8 new words to categorize from their neighbor! THEN - after several rotations, students thoroughly read the selection, and

Students make conversions using the exchange rate to change American dollars into currency from other countries. This activity could also be done on the computer, using the following calculator : http://coinmill.com/USD calculator.html#USD=8

Assigning responsibility to students with specific jobs is a tremendous help for classroom management! I have included a list of some of my classroom jobs, and have given explanations on how I use them for several that might be unclear.