Some Thanks...

The teacher workshops are completed, the room is set up, and the lessons are written.  It has been a long and exhausting week, but for the first time in a long time, I am feeling calm going into the school year.

This sense of calm comes from so many people who probably don't even know that they have helped me over the summer tie some loose ends together, rethink how and why I do things, and help me realize that all of us have the same issues in the classroom.  Everyone has the student who won't stop talking.  It's not just me.  Through the stories that they have shared, I have begun to feel that I'm not alone when I feel like I am swimming upstream.  So I want to take a moment as my school year begins to thank some of them.

First of all, I want to thank those who inspired my classroom bulletin boards this year.  Thank you for inspiration when I had none.

My favorite is the Star Wars themed growth mindset posters from Paul's (@TeacherPaulP) blog TeacherPaulP which I combined with Sarah's (@mathequalslove) idea, from her blog Math=Love, to put up sayings from a fixed and growth mindset.  I added Darth Vader and Yoda to the mindset phrases to keep the theme.  I will enjoy saying "Use the Force" this year when I hear fixed mindset statements.  

Next, I have to thank, Sarah (@msrubinteach) from Everyone's a Genius for the idea to do the loop-da-loop for how you learn a skill.  Looking forward to using it to remind students that learning is a process.  

Finally, Pam's (@pamjwilson) blog, the radical rational, had an awesome bulletin board for displaying sentence starters that I totally just did my best to recreate.  I am hoping that this will be well used by my students!

Besides all of the help with decorating, I need to also give some thanks to The Global Math Department for the truly awesome professional development that I attended this summer.  If you haven't attended a Global Math Department webinar yet, please try one.  It's free and that is every teacher's favorite word! 

MTBoS and everyone I met and worked with at Twitter Math Camp are awesome.  I am excited to become more and more involved with the both groups.  It is amazing how technology in general has made it possible to sit on my couch and talk to teachers all across the country.  I feel like I dated myself with that statement, but it's so true!

And speaking of sitting on my couch, I want to thank those who monitor the chats on Twitter.  I like to lurk during #msmathchat and Justin (@JustinAion) and Adrienne (@shlagteach) do an awesome job.  I know there are other groups and other monitors, but I haven't explored all of them yet! 

Thank you to everyone for your inspiration and willingness to share what you do! 

Behavior Expectations: My Only Summer Craft :(

This is going to be a short and sweet blog post because tomorrow is the first day of teacher workshops for the new school year and I have to start winding down and going to bed at a decent hour.  But I wanted to share one of the only craft projects I did for my classroom this summer (which I did today). 

I have been feeling like a grinch because I have had little enthusiasm to decorate my room.  I want it to look pretty, but really wish my fairy godmother of the classroom would come and wave a magic wand.  Then my room would be the prettiest in the land.  OK, enough wishful thinking.

I wanted to frame my expectations (ok, not really mine; borrowed from another school I used to teach at a few years back) and put them on the wall.  I went to my local craft store, but the $1 frames were to small and the others too expensive.  I thought about misscalcul8's blog and this picture.  I thought that I could get some scrapbook paper and laminate it.  I had found cute clothes pins at the craft store, so it seemed simple enough. 

Well, half way through picking out scrapbook paper, I decided that I wanted something sturdier.  I went back to get some foam board and found packages of 8"x10" foam board.  Problem solved!  I bought the foam board and the scrapbook paper and headed home to make something pretty for my classroom.

This is what I created.  Scrapbook paper and foam board are now my new best friends.  I am very excited and think that they will look great in the classroom.  Plus, they will be a visual reminder to the students. 

If you want to know more about the behavior expectations, here is a link to the parent handbook from my previous employer.  I don't use them exactly the way they are prescribed in this handbook. 

Goals for 2014-2015 Academic Year

I go back to work on Monday for teacher workshops and getting the classroom ready for the new school year.  I have been lacking motivation to go and spruce up my room this year and I know that I will have a lot of work.  Fortunately, I did not have to take everything down off of my walls and bulletin boards.  So, it is more about trying to make the room look fresh for the new school year and I have plenty of ideas to make the freshness happen. 

Each year that I have worked with my principal, he has asked for the staff to write their personal goals for the academic year.  I have been working on what mine will be.  I've narrowed it down to theses three:

1) Blended Classroom:
At the end of last year, I felt that the goal for next year was going to be flipping the classroom.  That is still a goal, but it will be much more of a blended classroom than I originally thought it would be.  There are a lot of reasons for this. 

The biggest factor to sway me is that I am going to "unit-fy" the Saxon Algebra I book.  I found that as I "unit-fy" the text, there were places that I could actually give myself time back.  I especially found that there were lots of places to make a foldable that contained ideas from several lessons from the text. 

I will still make tutorial videos for students throughout the year.  I will also assign some of them.  I am just not quite ready to be fully flipped.  Maybe that will change as the year progresses.

2) Standards Based Grading:
I want to make strides to do this better this year.  I have spent a lot of time matching units, lessons, and standards and melding them together to hopefully be cohesive.  I have developed a self tracking sheet for students to keep in their INB this year.  I started units in Jumprope (it's a free on-line SBG grade book).  Still playing with the grade book and will see how it works.  I like the reports that it will make for me.  I think it will help parents transition into SBG.  I am also in the process of making syllabi for each unit.  All of this has meant less time for making foldables and putting together INBs.

However, none of this will work well unless I am more diligent about getting the corrected work back to the students.  Feedback is an area I have struggled with my entire career.  I need to improve and by focusing on making standards based grading work, feedback has to be timely.

3) Less Time Explaining; More Time Doing:
My last goal ties into the blended classroom.  I want to spend more time doing math and talking about math.  I have already gotten a subscription to Mathalicious and I want to subscribe to Yummy Math.  Both sites have lots of interesting problems, are real life based, and are very, very reasonable for the teacher budget.  Especially, if you are like me and will be paying out of pocket to access them.  

I want the students to do more thinking which means I really need to keep the classroom focused on collaboration.  I am hoping that the problems I find on both of these sites (and others sites I find throughout the year) will help me to foster that collaborative feeling.  Time will tell.  Plus, I can plan all I want, but until I have students in my room trying to do these activities, I won't know.

Well, those are my three goal.  I think that is enough.  I also feel like I will be able to measure them by the end of the school year.  Success is hopefully in my future!

Integer Word Problem Practice with My Twist

I have been procrastinating by digging through my folder on my desktop labeled, "7th Grade Math".  Clever, huh?  I came across some integer problems in there that had a lot of promise as in-class practice.  It was a freebie that I had downloaded awhile back and it took a little research to find the author.  Anyway, I found that it came from Lisa at Teacher's Notebook.  I really liked the problems that were on the worksheet, but I was bummed that it was a worksheet.  There had to be a way to rework it, so that it would be more intriguing to my middle school kiddos.

photo credit: www.ew.com

I started thinking about the old game show from the 80s, "Classic Concentration".  If you haven't seen the show, contestants make matches on the game board to win prizes and slowly uncover a puzzle.  The person who solved it got a bigger prize. (See sample to the left)

Since the worksheets eventually lead students to do a coloring sheet, I thought that maybe I could use the idea of uncovering a puzzle. 

The first thing that I did was take the answer sheet and resize it to be 20 cm by 25 cm.  I then printed it out and glued it to a piece of card stock.

Next, I made a 5 x 4 grid.  Then I wrote the 12 correct answers in the boxes and 8 incorrect answers.  All of the solutions and incorrect solutions came from the answer key.

Then I cut it apart into 25 separate squares. 
                                                              

So this is the starting point of the activity.  I have the template for the answer sheet that students fill in at the end of this post.  The basic idea is that students would start like the above picture.  As they solve a problem, they will look at the board and then flip over the piece with their answer.  If they don't see their answer, they will need to check their work for errors.

As students continue to solve problems and flip over pieces, they will start to see the pieces of the answer sheet in the incorrect order.

Students will also realize that there are 8 unused answers.  Students will be asked to write a question/problem that has the unused answers as an answer.  

After the questions/problems are written, all of the pieces can be flipped over.  Students then have the job of getting the pieces into the correct order and making the picture.

The students' pictures will look like this when they are finished!

OK, so it's not exactly "Classic Concentration".  While making this activity though, I did have a few thoughts about how to make another activity that would resemble the actual game more.  I'm working on that one!





Here is the answer template that the students will be completing during the activity.  Before the activity, I would type in the questions from Lisa's worksheet or I am thinking to change "Problem" to be "Important information to solve the problem".  Then, I could just pass out the questions or put them on index cards.