Just a sampling...

Wow!  What a busy and fast year this has been!  I am working every single second at school and I know what I'm doing is still not enough.  My blog has been neglected for about six weeks so I wanted to take the time to show off some cool activities we have done in class. 

First off is a Kagan activity.  Our school has done two trainings on Kagan activities and I am trying hard to implement a few each week.  This one is called Quiz-Quiz-Trade and we used it to review our math properties.  The students loved it and it only took about 5 minutes.

Our second activity we tried was a gallery walk.  I had my students write examples of the different math properties on a sticky note for homework.  We then placed them all around the room under the correct property.  The students spent about one minute at each station reviewing the examples and identifying any that were incorrect.

The last activity I want to share was "Pass the equation".  Students sat back to back and passed around a worksheet with four equations.  Everyone had a paper and had to start the problem from where their teammate left off.  The students realized how important it was to show their work and to show it neatly!

New Beginnings

This past summer has been a time of transition.  I am leaving the private school world and diving head first back into public school.  I am super excited and have already learned tons of new ways to teach!  Leaving my colleagues and friends from my last school has been tough, but I strongly believe that God plants you where you are needed.  For every job I have been in, I can see a purpose.  I look forward to finding out why I have been planted at my new school!

The first and biggest task I faced was setting up my new room.  You'll see from the pictures that it started out dreary, but with the guidance of my teacher friend Luci and help from my family, my dreary room has turned into somewhat of a cheerful place.  You'll see that I've implemented some of the ideas I wanted to do at the end of last school year.

It's going to be a wonderful year and I look forwarding to sharing some of the new strategies that my students and I will get to experience in the classroom.  Time to soar like an EAGLE!

My nephew Sam and my two girls helped my move in!

Looking Back...and Forward

As the year comes to a close, I am trying to look back at all the good things that happened in class.  It was actually hard to think all the way back to August 2012, but I think I've come up with the most successful things for the year.
1)  Weekly Reviews!  This year our secondary math department decided to consistently give our students a Weekly Review each week.  The purpose of these reviews were to keep students current and fresh on concepts.  They were great in Algebra I for topics that we don't cover, especially the geometry concepts.
2)  Nspire Activities!  I worked hard this year trying to expand my knowledge of the TI Nspire calculator and integrating activities from the TI website.  I attended a T3 conference in January and we made a lot of progress!
3)  Accepting Failure!  The joke this year was that I wanted my students to get a problems wrong.  I wanted my students to learn how to be wrong and then grow from it.  I told them repeatedly that we almost learn more from them getting a problem wrong because then we can sit back and analyze the problem and figure out the mistake.  Also, it was important for me that students learned to take risks and not be afraid to participate in class.  We celebrating failure!
4)  Sentences!  This year we had our students write sentences for their solutions to all word problems.  The sentence couldn't being with a pronoun or number.  This was awesome and really helped the students with reasonableness.
5)  Project Empathy!  This was not a classroom activity, but our community service project.  We collected 60 Thanksgiving meals including the turkeys and made the news!  Check out our website www.saintsofempathy.com.

And so now that brings me to looking forward.  As of now, three things I would like to try next year.
1)  Command Center!  At the beginning of the year, you give your students classroom policies and then they forget about them.  Thanks to my wonderful colleague, Luci, I plan on putting up a Command Center bulletin board that will remind the students daily of classroom policies.
2)  Mama's Rules for Living!  After cleaning out a cabinet at home, I found a book called "Mama's Rules for Living" by Mamie McCullough.  This is a book full of quotes that my mom gave me back when.  I plan on putting up a quote a day for the students to ponder on.  Just because it's math doesn't mean we can't write and develop a relationship with our students.
3)  Fantasy Football!  My colleague had her students participate in Fantasy Baseball this Spring and I am pumped to maybe do Fantasy Football.  We found a great resource that has all the instructions, worksheets, and ideas needed to get it started.  We'll see....

Amazing Race

Today we tried something fun and exciting for our students...an Amazing Race!  The students spent the entire day racing around campus to different "pitstops".  Each of the teachers came up with a 20 minute challenge for the students to complete and earn stamps.  I loved our math challenges!  The first was to fly a kite and determine the height of the kite using the Pythagorean Theorem.  To do this, the students had to measure the string that was let out and the distance from the person holding the kite to the person standing underneath the kite.  This proved to be difficult because of the windy day, but we provided a "detour" where the students could still complete the task.

Our second challenge was for students to calculate their rate using d=rt.  They were to run the bases of the baseball field, skipping second base.  We only gave them the distance between home and 3rd base and home and 1st base.  They again had to use the Pythagorean Theorem to find the distance between 1st and 2nd and then calculate the total distance run.  The last task was to find their group's average rate.

The students really did a great job and it was nice spending a day outside taking in the sun!  Here are a few pics, with more to come!

My awesome colleague Monica who got us the cool shirts "Weapons of Math Instruction"!

My advisory team "Cute as Pi"!

Shape Up!

One of my favorite math tools to use is the CBR (Calculator Based Ranger)!  If you've never used one, these are motion detectors, timers, and much more.  This particular day, we created graphs involving distance and time.  Students had to create graphs that looked like plateaus, two mountains with different peaks, and letters.  I follow this activity up with a worksheet of interpreting graphs of different scenarios, such as graphing speed vs. time in climbing up a slide.  Love, love, love this!  Texas Instruments produces excellent activity books to use with the CBRs!  The next day we looked at the bounce of a ball in "Curve Ball".

Return of the Fiesta!

We had our annual salsa and queso making party in January.  I love this activity!  The class took a recipe and determined how many servings of that recipe they wanted to make for everyone.  We then used proportions to determine how much of each ingredient we would need.  I try not to make it as easy as doubling or tripling the recipe, which is why we talk about the number of servings to make.  My classes did an excellent job making the recipes and even had to improvise, since not everyone brought in their ingredients.  I was very impressed awith their culinary skills and they definitely knew their way around a kitchen better than the classes from last year!

These recipes are easy to make in the classroom because besides bowls, all you need is a blender and microwave.  However, this is a great activity to do with any recipe!

Here are some fun photos of the students in action: