Geometry and Fraction Bulletin Board

I work with the local university to mentor beginning education majors.  One of their assignments is to complete a bulletin board.  Both semesters my mentees have rocked out their bulletin boards.  Since they are in the classroom working with students and observing during math, both have centered around math topics.  In the fall we planned and implemented an art project focused around The Greedy Triangle.  Students then completed artwork and a response that demonstrated their knowledge of similar and congruent shapes.  Check out their work...

 Students hard at work on their works of art.  It was pajama day so you'll have to excuse their jammies.

The Greedy Triangle Visual and Written Response Grading Rubric

This week we are deep into our fraction unit.  I didn't have time to break the pacing too much so my mentee went with an instructional bulletin board centered on fractions.  She obviously did her research, and thought it out before working through it.  She left while I was teaching so I didn't have a chance to tell her how amazing it is.  I will be shooting her an email shortly. Check out her work....

Seamless Teaching

 If you do not subscribe to Teaching Tolerance's free magazine...you should.  (Click here to subscribe!) It comes with great articles, lessons, and resources for immediate use in the classroom.  One article that stuck out to me was Seamless Teaching.  It goes into some detail to help general ed. classroom teachers navigate the world of inclusion and co-teaching.

Illustration by Sunny Paulk

I Care!

I stumbled upon a great article posted onto Character Counts blog called What We Know About Superheroes.  There were some great quotes in the article that I wanted to pull out and share.....a great reminder of how far classroom climate can go.  

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. John C Maxwell

OurStory

Great new site find...

This is the first year that I will be teaching US History.  I've begun working on my class website for social studies and I have been looking for links to add.  Smithsonian, Thinkfinity, and Verizon have put together American history stories and related resources. They are organized by topic and era. Check it out!!

http://americanhistory.si.edu/ourstory/

What are some of your favorite American History resources?

Changes

City Change

Grade Change

Subject Change

Yes....I'm doing them all this coming year.  After much deliberation over the last year I decided to leave the only area I had lived and worked in after college and move.  Now I did just decide to move home so it isn't a huge change but I have left the colleagues and support that I have always had.  I left the teachers who could reassure me when I doubted myself and the teachers I knew I could turn to and admit when I feel like I failed a child.  They never judged and always had an encouraging word.  They pushed me to try harder and loved their work as much as I do.  The hardest part of this change has been leaving them.  I have called to check in on their planning meetings with new team members and to hear about their first days of school (for a certain year round teacher!).  I will miss them greatly.  Luckily with the advent of the internet and cell phones, I still get to email them cool stuff I find.  They still send along resources to me.  And we can still share book covers of those must buy books (Do you own Squids will be Squids?  It's my new classroom buy!)

Weren't we cute?? :)

My reason for switching cities/states was about me.  I'll get paid more.  This is always a plus.  NC has frozen salaries for 4 years with no step increase (this goes for this coming year as well).  I'm also at home.  Right now I'm staying at my mom's house and while it isn't perfect it is something you don't truly cherish until you've moved out on your own and return.  Family dinners, chatting over a cup of coffee, a hug goodnight, etc.  As well...for this summer and this summer only, my younger brother and sister are BOTH living in town.  We're all back in the same city.  I have the time off to go and visit and spend time with them.  I know I will always look back on this summer and be very grateful for it.

Now the grade and subject changes were necessary for me to be able to work at the school I wanted.  I interviewed and then was offered the job that night although some of the specific weren't decided on yet.  Over the next few weeks it was decided what grade I would be working with (4th or 5th...5th grade it is) and what subjects I would be teaching.  It looks like I will be team teaching with another teacher (1 of the 6 on the team) and be teaching language arts, social studies, and math.  She will be teaching science, while I teach her class math.  Math was my non-negotiable subject :)  The first 3 years out of college I taught 5th so the age is not new and it is actually a grade I love.  They have independence, personality, and they challenge me and teach me everyday.

I've taken most of the summer off from thinking about school and my class next year.  This has been a big step for me and has allowed me to work on myself.  I think teachers often forget to do that.  However, now as we near the end of July I'm gearing up and getting ready to think about it.  Postings will soon be coming about the new things I'll be doing and the ideas I've stolen borrowed from others online (Pinterest and blogs are a godsend!).

I know what you did last night....

So there is a young girl in my class whose father passed away a couple years ago.  She used to mention her mom's friend but now this friend has a new title - mom's "special friend."  Well I knew exactly what she meant so I never asked further.  However, it came up again today at lunch.  I decided to joke around with her and asked what a "special friend" was.  She said that for a girl its a boy and for a boy it would be a girl.  "And guess what?!" she says.  Then, referring to the student sitting next to her, she says that this girl's dad has both a wife and a special friend.

WOAH?!

I had just seen the above post on Pinterest but I just couldn't stop it.  I tried my best to defend this dad. I don't even really like him.  She has written poems of the pain he caused her when he left and got a new family.  She gets so excited when she actually gets to visit him.  Last time she visited him, he left her with a friend who was a teacher (she shared this to the class as well).  Little did I know at the time that this friend was more than just a babysitter.  Nevertheless, I tried to defend him anyways.

"Well I'm sure they are just friends..I have lots of friends."

"Nope, she had pictures of the two of them at the lake and the beach that his wife didn't know he went to."

"Well.... (here is me stumbling for words) I do lots of different things with my friends."

"No.  She was his special friend.  I asked him if [his wife] knew about her and he said...NO and don't tell her."

So what is the lesson?

Don't have both a wife and a special friend....and don't tell your daughter!  Her classmates and teachers will find out even if your wife doesn't!

Nerves...

So who do you think is more nervous before testing? Teachers or Students? 

After reading Testing Miss Malarkey (free on SlideShare)..I must agree that teachers are.  I'm worried that they're worried and I'm worried that they won't use all their strategies and I'm worried about the students who will work their hardest and still have to retake.  I'm worried about their repressed energy during testing causing poor choices during indoor recess after testing b/c of the rain.

Today we "popped our fears away."  Students (and myself) blew up balloons, wrote our testing fears on them with Sharpie and then went out side and popped them away. I think it was therapeutic for the students fears/worries to be heard and validated.  Then, the act of getting rid of them allowed us to move on to meditative mandala coloring to create a calm and anxiety free environment.

Someone once said...

"If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life."
— Leo Tolstoy

Someone once said...

"To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is key to happiness."
— John Dewey

Conflict Resolution

So I just taught a lesson to my students about conflict resolution.  We read a fable from Australia about name calling, discussed how name calling made us feel and how we could handle it, wrote a list of sentence starters, and did some role playing with characters like Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf.  Not only have we talked about standing up for ourselves this year but we have also discussed how to stand up for your friends if you see something going on.  I ask the kids to do it...I expect that they will stand up for their classmates and yet....I can't do the same thing.
I was letting my dog out this morning at about 6:45am when my downstairs neighbors decided to bring their argument out to the sidewalk.  Now these neighbors like to smoke illegal substances on the porch and listen to loud music at all times of the night, however, I believe that no one should have been subjected to the yelling that pursued.  The woman sat with her arms crossed just taking it as the man yelled, cursed, and berated her.  He used very few other words besides F*&% and B$%&*. Most of it wasn't even grammatically correct (but that's the teacher in me).  Did I go over and stand up for this woman? No.  Did I approach the situation so he didn't feel like he could gang up on her? No.  Instead I tried to make myself invisible which was hard with my dog barking at this man.  I didn't make eye contact and tried not to look.  I didn't want him to yell at me or worse.  I realize this was the best choice and all my friends would tell me the same thing.  But then I begin to think....do students not feel the same way? 

Aren't 9-year-old bullies just as scary to 9-year-olds?