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One of my favorite math resources is Marian Smalls Making Math Meaningful. This book goes from Pre-K to 8th grade, so its relevant for many different teachers. The book starts off by focusing your instruction on the big ideas in mathematics. I find this important because I find in math, we can get a little bogged down in the details. I think its important for the students to understand what those big ideas are. One of the most helpful parts of this book I find is the common misconceptions. So for each task, she'll lay out for you what some of the mistakes students might make are. This is helpful because this is where you should start your teaching. Some of the common misconceptions will happen every year in every grade for all students. These are the trickier parts of learning the mathematical concepts and if this is where you can start your teaching, then you can avoid having to re-teach strategies or concepts at the end of the lesson.

Apps for Autism was one of my favorite books when I was teaching the special education classroom, but its no less relevant in the classroom I have this year. Teachers never have the time to go through testing each and every special education app that has been designed for iPads. iPads are really common in classrooms now and they can be an invaluable tool for student learning. So this book lays out all the different super helpful apps for student learning. This book says Autism, but as I said, special education teaching strategies, I find, are just best practices. This book is divided into social skills lessons, communication lessons, and also has sections about math and language. This is really great. A lot of the apps are free so you can download them, test them out, they can give you feedback on the apps, tell you how valuable they were, tell you how fun they were, they could write reviews of the apps. This just saves you a lot of time. Someone has done the work for you to categorize and review two hundred different apps for iPads. 

Tribes Learning Communities is one of my favorite books.  This book is essential at the very beginning of the year. To build a safe and positive classroom environment, you want to build community. This book is great, because it teaches you how, step-by-step, to build that community in your classroom. At the end of the book, there is over one hundred activities that you can do with your classroom to build community. The tasks focus on things like how to present yourself to the classroom, how to communicate effectively. This book is good for Pre-K into high school in my opinion. It crosses boundaries for grade levels; its relevant for all students. The tasks at the end of the book focus on things like goal setting, communicating effectively, resolving conflict, creating community, energizing your classroom, and being a positive member of the classroom community.

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