I cannot believe that a new year is just around the corner. I am joining the linky party over at Farley's blog Oh Boy 4th Grade. I am wishing all my followers a very blessed and hopeful 2013. May peace, love, and joy be yours in the new year.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, December 30, 2012
First 12 in the Last of 12 Linky Party
I am joining this fun linky party that looks back at my first twelve posts of 2012: First 12 in the Last of 12 Linky Party. Please feel free to create a post of your own and join in.
1) 2012 New Year Resolutions 1/2/12
2) After School Routine Checklist 1/5/12 This is my most viewed post having been viewed over 75,000 times! It was repinned over 1300 times from one pinterest user that pinned it. I have no idea how that happened, but I get visitors to my blog every day looking at that post.
3) Finally Posting my Vista Print Order 1/7/12 This post was all about the goodies I created over Christmas break last year. I spent hours creating everything seen there including the first five minutes and last two minutes of class posters.
4) Currently January 1/9/12
5) A Day in My Life School Edition 1/17/12 This was a fun link party to look at what a day in the life entailed. It was so fun to read everyone's posts and see how different things were run in different schools.
6) Teacher Workday 1/21/12
7) Formative Assessment In Class √ Ups 1/28/12
8) Help! 1/30/12 This post was about was soliciting advice for opening a teacher store and maybe now a year later I will finally get around to it. YIKES! I did get a new MacBook Air for Christmas so I have absolutely no more excuses (other than lack of time).
9) February Goal Setting 2/1/12
10) Homework Linky Party 2/5/12
11) Currently February 2/6/12
12) Tag I'm It 2/9/12
Friday, December 28, 2012
Math Focus Wall Photos-Updated
I wanted to share some recent photos I took of my Math Focus Wall. I apologize for not posting these photos sooner as I feel I have been promising to post them since school started, but it really has been a busy year thus far. Thank goodness for break and some time for me to blog!
The evolution of my Math Focus Wall has been a work in progress from my creative thought process and planning last school year to the background design seen in this post: The First Sneak Peek and the original design seen here: Take 1.
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| TA DA! I think I am finally happy with it |
After a few months of school and actually using the wall with my students I realized that I needed to have two separate sides to reflect the two different courses I teach. On the left is the board for my accelerated math 7 class and the right side is for the three sections of math 7 I teach.
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| Accelerated Math 7 |
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| Math 7 |
I also changed up some things to make the board work for our class needs. It specifies the CC
standards, lesson, topic, and student objectives for each day, as well as, the Mathia pacing expectation for that week (that is what unit students should be on in our computer program). The poster on the top left of the board is the Mathematical Practice Standards and as you can see I still need to get my Problem Solving Strategies Posters on the top right.
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| You can see Math Vocabulary to the left of the Focus Wall |
Creating a Math Focus Wall was a major goal of mine for the 2012-2013 school year and I am very happy with and proud of how it turned out. It was a lot of working putting the wall up this summer. I am also finding it very time consuming to have to create all the posters that go up and can change daily. I use sentence strips for the goals and lesson topics, but it is easier to print out the common core standards and lesson information.
Of course this will all be done for next year, but this year it is a ton of work. I try to create everything in advance for the chapter so it is all ready to go. I like to make sure the focus wall is done for the next day so I don't have to worry about it in the morning when I get to school. I did not realize how labor intensive this all would be because we can do three to five different lessons per week and when the lesson changes so does the focus wall. I do feel it is worth the effort to have this information prominently displayed for students around the SMARTBoard which we use daily.
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| What it looked like on a different day |
I would be happy to answer any questions you may have about the math focus wall. #made4math
Thursday, December 27, 2012
We had a very Merry Christmas and hope you did too!
We were in school through last Friday and being that we are close to Milwaukee, we did not see the snowfall that other communities did on Thursday/Friday that caused a wave of school cancellations in SE WI. I did not mind though, I always hate to have a snow day right before break, and I had students finishing up tests and quiz corrections, so being in school was easier for me than not being in school.
Sunday night was our family of five Christmas celebration. We had reservations at PF Chang's for dinner and then a couple last minute gift purchases at the mall before heading home to open presents. I went with a color scheme of red, white, and silver for gift wrapping and loved how it turned out! I also made sure to put ribbon or a bow on every gift I wrapped. I really enjoyed wrapping things up and Cooper (my 7 yo) commented more than once how pretty I wrapped everything. Thankfully my boys appreciate these extra touches.
The boys were spoiled as always. I got a new Citizen watch with a pink face that I absolutely love! I also got some mercury glass trays and containers from Pottery Barn that will hopefully help me organize some things in the master bath. I was completed blown away by the surprise gift my awesome husband got me.
A MacBook Air! I was so stunned that I think my first words were, "You did not get me a MacBook" when I opened the box it was in. I have really been wanting my own because I am tired of lugging my school MacBook Pro home every night (and it is getting soooo slow). I also now will not have to reinstall fonts every summer after they reconfigure my computer at school. I can also now finally hook up my Silhouette that I got LAST YEAR and have never used because I was not able to download the software on my school computer and I just loathe using our Dell desktop. So as you can see, a new laptop was something I was definitely desiring, but completely shocked to receive. I now definitely plan on getting my butt in gear and opening a TN or TPT store. So many ideas of lessons to create and now no excuse to not create them.
Christmas Eve we met my parents for church for the 5 PM service. The boys and I had been out to lunch and the burger and bloody mary I had were delicious, but did not set well with me at all. I was not feeling good about an hour before church so we ended up being a bit late for the service, but I toughed it out and felt OK the rest of the night. We had a nice supper of tenderloin or turkey sandwiches. It was just my oldest brother, my parents and us for the evening as my other two brothers were celebrating with their inlaws.
Christmas Day the boys slept in until 6:30 AM, very surprising because Cooper was up at 4AM the night St Nick came. The boys got the WiiU and some games for it (our Wii has been out of commission for a few months) among some other gifts. They were not expecting it at all (not sure they really had even heard much about it).
My mom made a delicious ham dinner and we all overindulged. She also is a master baker and makes dozens and dozens of delicious and cute cookies. The woman is talented! The grandkids opened their gifts after lunch and then the adults opened theirs. I got lots of wonderful presents, but spending time as a family is of course the greatest gift of all.
This afternoon Greg and I ran to Target to do some Christmas clearance shopping for next year. We got some new lights and gift wrapping supplies. I have to say there was not too much left, unlike last year where I really loaded up on gift wrap. Tonight Greg and I are doing a little early NYE adult only celebration at my favorite restaurant Bacchus.
I hope you are all enjoying your break, spending time with loved ones and relaxing, as well as recharging, because lord knows we teachers need to!
Sunday night was our family of five Christmas celebration. We had reservations at PF Chang's for dinner and then a couple last minute gift purchases at the mall before heading home to open presents. I went with a color scheme of red, white, and silver for gift wrapping and loved how it turned out! I also made sure to put ribbon or a bow on every gift I wrapped. I really enjoyed wrapping things up and Cooper (my 7 yo) commented more than once how pretty I wrapped everything. Thankfully my boys appreciate these extra touches.
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| The boys could not wait to open their presents |
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| This baby is light as a feather |
Christmas Eve we met my parents for church for the 5 PM service. The boys and I had been out to lunch and the burger and bloody mary I had were delicious, but did not set well with me at all. I was not feeling good about an hour before church so we ended up being a bit late for the service, but I toughed it out and felt OK the rest of the night. We had a nice supper of tenderloin or turkey sandwiches. It was just my oldest brother, my parents and us for the evening as my other two brothers were celebrating with their inlaws.
Christmas Day the boys slept in until 6:30 AM, very surprising because Cooper was up at 4AM the night St Nick came. The boys got the WiiU and some games for it (our Wii has been out of commission for a few months) among some other gifts. They were not expecting it at all (not sure they really had even heard much about it).
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| Family photo |
We had a wonderful Christmas Day with my side of the family. My niece turned two in November and it is so fun to have a little one again (Cooper is the next youngest). Also it's lots of fun for me to have a little girl around. As you all know boys rule my life!
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| The boys with Nana and Papa |
We headed home around 8 PM and Greg got the Wii U set up for the boys. Since then we have all been chilling out and relaxing. We all watched Marley and Me (love that movie) this morning and I watched The Family Stone last night. Got both those DVDs from St Nick. They are two movies I can watch over and over. I also read a Fern Michaels Christmas book.
This afternoon Greg and I ran to Target to do some Christmas clearance shopping for next year. We got some new lights and gift wrapping supplies. I have to say there was not too much left, unlike last year where I really loaded up on gift wrap. Tonight Greg and I are doing a little early NYE adult only celebration at my favorite restaurant Bacchus.
I hope you are all enjoying your break, spending time with loved ones and relaxing, as well as recharging, because lord knows we teachers need to!
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Easy classroom decor for Christmas
Despite Thanksgiving being so early this year, Christmas really came quickly. I guess implementing a new curriculum has the effect of making it seem like all my days run together. I did manage to do a few very simple, but cute touches in my classroom to make it feel a little more festive, while believe it or not, keeping within my color scheme.
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| My windows all decked out. See the green and blue snowflakes hanging off the light? |
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| I will replace these with snowmen after break. |
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| I have some other snowmen window clings for after break. |
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| These will be up until Feb. |
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| Snowflake border that will stay up until Feb. Don't I have the best view?! |
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| Pink snowflake. LOVE! |
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| My favorite decor item. I was sad to take it down on Friday. :( |
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| Teacher gifts for my boys. |
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Saturday, December 15, 2012
We teach in schools, not fortresses
As the mother of three and a teacher for over two decades I am deeply saddened and disturbed by the devastating acts that occurred yesterday morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, CT. I know if you are a reader of my blog you are equally disturbed because the people that follow my blog value education and more importantly they value children.
As a mother I must put my faith in the schools I send my boys to. I have to believe and trust that their teachers and school administrators are doing everything they possibly can to keep my boys safe while in their care. To the very core of my heart I believe this. If I did not trust for their safety I would not be able to kiss them goodbye every morning before heading off to school myself.
As teachers we are trained to remain calm and cool in the case of a crisis. The students will always take their cues from us, so if there is a crisis we must remain calm so they also remain calm. We go through the motions during our emergency drills and we take those drills very seriously. We also expect and teach our students to take those drills seriously, because God forbid if there ever comes a time when it is not a drill, we need to be prepared and so do they.
The problem is that all the emergency plans and lock down drills in the world can just never prepare you for an event like what happened yesterday.
How could you ever prepare yourself to interrupt your teaching at a moment's notice, knowing that it wasn't a drill, but the real deal (because you know you teach in the safest place in the world and nothing bad would ever happen in <insert the name of your community here> and try to fathom what is going on outside your classroom as you lock the door and attempt to take cover with nearly 30 students, where no cover really exists?
How would you ever prepare yourself for the possibility that the last people you might ever see or speak to are the students that a minute ago may have been driving you crazy with their incessant talking, or maybe you were sharing an inside joke, that only that class would understand, or maybe you were just doing what you do every single day, trying to educate your students to the best of your ability? How would you prepare yourself for that?
How would you ever prepare yourself to know the right words to whisper to comfort and assure those students that you spend every weekday with, that things will be Ok and they will survive this when in fact you have no idea what you are even trying to survive?
I don't think you could ever adequately prepare yourself for an event like what happened yesterday. We all hope and pray and believe this could never happen to us. Because if we didn't believe we were safe, how would we get in our cars and drive ourselves to school every day? How could we send our children off to the bus stop every morning if we didn't believe they were going to a safe place where the people caring for them would protect them?
We try do everything humanly possible to minimize the risk and assure the safety of our students, but the bottom line is that we teach in schools, not fortresses. Secure entrances and even armed security guards are no match for an intruder armed with assault rifles and a death wish.
This senseless tragedy will now cause every school district in our nation to examine their school safety and crisis response plans. We will wonder if we are doing enough. Are our entrances secure? (They were at Sandy Hook and it did not matter). We never address the real issue of how broken our world is. We are no longer assured safety anywhere; not at the movie theatre, not shopping for Christmas presents at the mall, not at school.
We unfortunately are not able to prevent these events from happening. We need to make sure we are trained to respond in the best way to minimize the risks and lives lost. The staff at Sandy Hook obviously were trained well and did everything possible to try and protect their students, some even giving their lives in the process.
As educators we make a choice to spend our days with children because we have a passion and love for teaching. We do everything in our power to make school a safe place for our students.
We will go back to school this coming Monday with heavy hearts and thoughts and prayers for the lost lives and the stolen potential in those lives, for the loss of innocence in the children that survived, and the sense of security that was taken from the Newton community and from our own selves.
We will ask ourselves many questions that even if we had the answers to them, we still would not feel satisfied. We will do whatever we can to assure our own students that school is in fact a safe place, well as safe as any place in our broken world can be.
As with any tragedy like this, stories will emerge in the coming days of heroism, acts of kindness, of people coming together as a community to heal their broken hearts. That's what gives us hope. That's why we teach, because we have to believe that we are educating the very beings that will fix this broken world. We go to school every single day knowing that we can make a difference in the lives of the students we work with, and we hope and pray every single day that we can keep them safe. And like the teachers at Sandy Hook, most of us would give our very lives to protect the lives of the students we teach. We are educators, it's just what we do.
As a mother I must put my faith in the schools I send my boys to. I have to believe and trust that their teachers and school administrators are doing everything they possibly can to keep my boys safe while in their care. To the very core of my heart I believe this. If I did not trust for their safety I would not be able to kiss them goodbye every morning before heading off to school myself.
As teachers we are trained to remain calm and cool in the case of a crisis. The students will always take their cues from us, so if there is a crisis we must remain calm so they also remain calm. We go through the motions during our emergency drills and we take those drills very seriously. We also expect and teach our students to take those drills seriously, because God forbid if there ever comes a time when it is not a drill, we need to be prepared and so do they.
The problem is that all the emergency plans and lock down drills in the world can just never prepare you for an event like what happened yesterday.
How could you ever prepare yourself to interrupt your teaching at a moment's notice, knowing that it wasn't a drill, but the real deal (because you know you teach in the safest place in the world and nothing bad would ever happen in <insert the name of your community here> and try to fathom what is going on outside your classroom as you lock the door and attempt to take cover with nearly 30 students, where no cover really exists?
How would you ever prepare yourself for the possibility that the last people you might ever see or speak to are the students that a minute ago may have been driving you crazy with their incessant talking, or maybe you were sharing an inside joke, that only that class would understand, or maybe you were just doing what you do every single day, trying to educate your students to the best of your ability? How would you prepare yourself for that?
How would you ever prepare yourself to know the right words to whisper to comfort and assure those students that you spend every weekday with, that things will be Ok and they will survive this when in fact you have no idea what you are even trying to survive?
I don't think you could ever adequately prepare yourself for an event like what happened yesterday. We all hope and pray and believe this could never happen to us. Because if we didn't believe we were safe, how would we get in our cars and drive ourselves to school every day? How could we send our children off to the bus stop every morning if we didn't believe they were going to a safe place where the people caring for them would protect them?
We try do everything humanly possible to minimize the risk and assure the safety of our students, but the bottom line is that we teach in schools, not fortresses. Secure entrances and even armed security guards are no match for an intruder armed with assault rifles and a death wish.
This senseless tragedy will now cause every school district in our nation to examine their school safety and crisis response plans. We will wonder if we are doing enough. Are our entrances secure? (They were at Sandy Hook and it did not matter). We never address the real issue of how broken our world is. We are no longer assured safety anywhere; not at the movie theatre, not shopping for Christmas presents at the mall, not at school.
We unfortunately are not able to prevent these events from happening. We need to make sure we are trained to respond in the best way to minimize the risks and lives lost. The staff at Sandy Hook obviously were trained well and did everything possible to try and protect their students, some even giving their lives in the process.
As educators we make a choice to spend our days with children because we have a passion and love for teaching. We do everything in our power to make school a safe place for our students.
We will go back to school this coming Monday with heavy hearts and thoughts and prayers for the lost lives and the stolen potential in those lives, for the loss of innocence in the children that survived, and the sense of security that was taken from the Newton community and from our own selves.
We will ask ourselves many questions that even if we had the answers to them, we still would not feel satisfied. We will do whatever we can to assure our own students that school is in fact a safe place, well as safe as any place in our broken world can be.
As with any tragedy like this, stories will emerge in the coming days of heroism, acts of kindness, of people coming together as a community to heal their broken hearts. That's what gives us hope. That's why we teach, because we have to believe that we are educating the very beings that will fix this broken world. We go to school every single day knowing that we can make a difference in the lives of the students we work with, and we hope and pray every single day that we can keep them safe. And like the teachers at Sandy Hook, most of us would give our very lives to protect the lives of the students we teach. We are educators, it's just what we do.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Decimal Operations Foldable
Tomorrow's lesson is on multiplying and dividing rational numbers. What we find in 7th grade is that many students still struggle with decimal and fraction operations. We just finished learning how to multiply and divide integers the other day. Love the way Carnegie teaches integer operations. That really deserves its own post someday.
Anyway, today was a half day and it was the perfect amount of time to correct homework and then finish a foldable they started last week (when we were doing addition and subtraction of rational numbers). We also did a separate foldable on multiplying and dividing fractions and mixed numbers (again another post for another time).
The material we covered today is expected to be mastered when they come to my class, but with many students that is just not the case. The foldable I used can be found here. I would like to make the multiplication example a bit more challenging, but beggars cannot be choosers and this foldable was already made and good enough for me to use for the purpose intended. Someday I will make some original foldables, but with a new curriculum implementation that is a very low priority at this moment.
I really like projecting what the students fill in on their foldable. We go through each example step by step and it goes MUCH more quickly if they are able to follow along with the SMARTBoard.
Anyway, today was a half day and it was the perfect amount of time to correct homework and then finish a foldable they started last week (when we were doing addition and subtraction of rational numbers). We also did a separate foldable on multiplying and dividing fractions and mixed numbers (again another post for another time).
The material we covered today is expected to be mastered when they come to my class, but with many students that is just not the case. The foldable I used can be found here. I would like to make the multiplication example a bit more challenging, but beggars cannot be choosers and this foldable was already made and good enough for me to use for the purpose intended. Someday I will make some original foldables, but with a new curriculum implementation that is a very low priority at this moment.
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| Front of the foldable |
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| Foldable inside |
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| Addition example projected on SMARTBoard |
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| Subtraction |
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| Multiplication |
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| Division |
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Currently December
It's hard to believe it's December 1st. I still never even posted photos from Thanksgiving! I am having a wonderful Christmas prep filled weekend. I made some chocolate dipped pretzels and pretzel, rolo, m&m candies this morning. They have all been eaten already! I cannot keep up with these boys. :)
Greg and the boys got our Christmas tree last night and it is in the living room waiting to be decorated. The lights are up outside (I think that's the earliest he has ever gotten them up). I plan on decorating the fireplace mantel and the foyer tomorrow.
In between all the Christmas prep I need to grade quizzes this weekend. All four of my classes took a quiz on Friday and now I need to grade them all so I can hand them back Monday?
Hope you are all having a fun and enjoyable weekend! I am linking up with Farley for her December Currently. Join in one of my favorite monthly linky parties.
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