Growing Mind and Bodies

Being a middle school teacher is way more than teaching students math.  Some people say they would never want to teach middle school but truthfully if you can teach middle school, you can do ANYTHING!

Including but not limited to, my role as a middle school teacher is to:

• Encourage students to join different clubs
• Encouraging some kids to talk, to anyone!
• Help them deal with parental issues
• Organize their lives including but not limited to folders, lockers and schedule. 
• Be there to listen when they don't know what do to about a boy/girl
• Know everything about their 'time of the month'
• Know when students need to go to the bathroom for a BM
• Hold a Pokemon lunch once a week, because they still like to play with their friends
• Modeling correct manners and following through with please and thank you's
• Making sure they 'have' something instead of 'got' something
• Introducing them to things in life, like the prices at the grocery store

And probably my favorite roll as a middle school teacher, measuring their physical growth.  Some boys grew 4 inches from the start of the year!  WOW

What other roles do you play other than teacher? 

Valentines Day 2015

So for now it is a tradition that I help with valentines for my nieces.  If you remember, last year we made crayon lips for all their little friends.  This year, we made Olaf!

Only one of my nieces was able to do it this year.  Well, mostly because we waited till the last minute to do them!  I really missed Mackenzie :(

So back to Olaf.  I had seen on Pinterest really cute Olaf's in a bag so we went for it.  We had to piece together a snowman in a bag and attach a label to the top!   For the label I used pages (on a Mac).  I downloaded some Olaf clip art and used a fun font that I found from dafont.com a few months ago.  I have a secret obsession with font, by the way. I left a blank so that Ashley wrote her name one each one.  That is a total of 30.   I didn't know how well this was going to go because of flashbacks of last year and how painful it was watching a 3 year old write 6 letters. This year, much better.  Holy cow the difference three and four!

 Now time for the snowman.  I purchased everything at the local grocery store.  I used giant, regular and mini marshmallows for the body.   For the arms, of course, pretzel sticks.  For the nose and buttons, Mike and Ike's and mini M&M's respectively.

It was time to let the girl do her thing.  She put a big, medium and 4 small marshmallows in each bag.   She then continued to put in 2 pretzel sticks, 6 mini M&M's and 1 nose.   She counted each mini marshmallow and M&M's out everything.  I will come clean.... Ashley was still napping when I got to my dad's house so we started to make some in advance and left 5 for Ashley to do.  Thank goodness because it was painful watching her count out the M&M's!  While she was finishing making the snowmen, I stapled the label on.  I stapled 25 of them of before Ashley had finished 1 bag, just to give reference. They turned out totally cute!

So we were done and waiting for dinner to finish in the oven so we played!  We had left over marshmallows which we were never going to eat and pretzel sticks that our hands had been all over so we improvised.  I love her spirit and creativity.   We started building a house, then worked out with our dumbbells and then Ashley pulled out the Q-tip!  I was dying laughing!

Hope you enjoyed!  Happy Valentines Day from my family to yours!

Stop Motion

Over the past few years Jason has been watching Frank Howarth on YouTube.  He is a phenomenal woodworker who incorporates stop motion into his videos. So I decided that my goal was to incorporate stop motion video into my newest video resume, tweet at him and have him tweet back.  Here is what I have so far!  I can't wait for the final product to be finished. 

I am really over the moon right now!  Hope you enjoy.  Any suggestions I would love to hear them!

PARCC Prep

So as our school is moving closer to taking the PARCC, I am on a committee whose task is to convey information to the different buildings in the district and come up with a plan to prepare students for the format of the PARCC test.  

I made this short video for an introduction to students.  Kinda cheesy but it is short and sweet.  Not so bad for my first video!

Applying an Algebraic Rule

As part of CMP3, there was a unit project that suggested enlarging a picture using an algebraic rule applied to the coordinates. The standard it was addressing was recreating a drawing of a different scale. I thought that I would give it a try.  So the process began.  I decided to pick different pictures for the students to do, approximately 15 different ones.  1st period, I had them download the picture, put the grid on the picture and print it.  What a disaster.  2nd period, I had them start their grid while I printed pictures with grids on them already.  Much better!

Each student had to choose either to enlarge or shrink their picture.  Majority picked enlarging which was fine with me!  Next thing they had to do was start to create their grid.  We used big paper and marked off at each centimeter and connected the dots.  This also took way longer than expected.  Not for future self, buy large graph paper!  Once the grid was drawn, it was time to start identifying coordinates on their original image, apply the geometric rule and graph their new point.

For some this went well, others, needed some help.  I would say that by the end of it, 99% of students were able to this independently.  As you can see below, each student had their original picture and their coordinates on hand while creating their masterpiece.  It was a combination of both of these that allowed a student to be successful. 

Here is a picture of a completed shrinking.  I love it!

Overall I would say the was just ok.  To improve, I would have had graph paper already in the desired large size and had the pictures ready to go from the beginning.   With these changes, I think that it will go a lot smoother!

I finally put these up in the hallway.  I will snap a picture soon and post it here!

Day 1: When Things Start to Change

It is the first student attendance day after winter break and I am tired!  Yesterday we had institute day which was nice but I still went to bed at 8pm!  HOLY COW!

As I start to reflect the first 4 months of school and look to the next 4 months there are somethings that I am going to do differently.

1. Incorporate more MARS tasks into the routine.  If you are not familiar with MARS tasks, they are wonderful activities that access student's thinking and push them to the next step.  A lot like what PARCC is about to do to all these kids.
2. Go back to backwards design.  My school adopted CMP3 this year and it has been a rough transition for others and myself. I need to take back the feeling that I am accomplishing things in the classroom and really push these kids to be their best.
3.  Start taking advantage of the information that entrance and exit slips give.  My curriculum partner and I were talking at institute yesterday and decided to cut the number of problems on the weekly quiz and gain this information other ways.

Do you have anything that you decided needed to change when you stepped away for 2 weeks?  I would love to hear about it.

Homemade Presents!

My Auntie Terese said, "You and Jason work so well together.  You think of things and he makes them!"  It is kinda true.  So this past Christmas, I was stumped at what to get my Dad and Stepmom.  So here we are, 3 days before and it finally hits me, a growth chart!  Why was this the perfect gift?  Well, they have been measuring my nieces on the wall, behind the coats and if they ever move, this will be lost forever!

So Jason and I went out to Owl Lumber in Lombard.  We (really him) picked out some great wood.  We bought a total of 3 pieces of wood to his mom and my aunt could also get one, eventually.  We had no idea how this was going to go so we went to work in the basement.  Jason made the board flat and square with his joiner and plainer.

It was not time to test out how we would make the marks so it looks like a giant ruler.  Really funny that this is like using a scale factor!  Each inch was going to look like 1 foot on the wood.  Jason got out the router and we picked some different size bits out and tested.  We decided that the 1 foot marks should be the longest (2.5 inches) , then the half foot (2 inches) , quarter foot (1.5 inches) and each inch (1 inch) would be the shortest.   We had found success!

So now it was time to mark the board and go for it!  We had to set up a straight edge that I held while Jason used the router.  It was quite the process but it worked!

Now that the router part was finished, we could clean it and put a clear coat on it. For the numbers, I went to Home Depot and bought 4" address numbers.  It looks so good!

Best Christmas present ever!  Now the kids can be measured forever and ever.  I can't wait till my nieces are measuring their kids on this growth chart!