Last Thursday, I’m teaching about various number systems and we get to “rational”. I ask, “Does anyone see a word hiding in there that can help us define what rational numbers are?” Without hesitation, a student, genuine as can be, yells, “RAT!!!” And that, my friends, is why I teach middle schoolers!
(And in case you were wondering, the word I was *hoping* for was “ratio”!)
Check out this presentation for some great technology tips!
One of my favorites:
Super Teacher Tools is AMAZING as a random name generator, group generator and seating chart maker. I love the gameshow templates too, and their ease of use. Only potential downside… some tools are FLASH, so iPads are not ideal.
I have never used this site, but I plan to! Upload an image, tell blockposters how many sheets wide you’d like your poster to be, then receive a pdf of the new, huge poster to print!
Labor Day weekend is upon us! What a great first week of school I have had. I have never, ever been thanked by so many students as they exit my classroom every day. I am really enjoying the manners of my new 8th graders – they rock!
After a great week of teaching, I came home to my usual cup of hot tea and checked my e-mail. As I was reading through all the Labor Day Weekend promotions in my inbox, I saw a great coupon code for 30% off of a purchase of $30 or more for Bath & Body Works. It’s about time to start stocking up on great fall antibacterial scents, so I took the bait and went to the website.
Why do they ALWAYS price things so that the total is $29.97 and the code won’t work? DOH!
I wasn’t about to pay for another $3.33 bottle of soap without breaking out some Algebra skills. A secret section of the website featured summer soap scents for $2.75 each.
That’s it Bath & Body Works… it is ON!
I grabbed a post-it note and wrote 2.75x + 3.33y = 30 and started weighing my options.
What would you do? What do you think I did? 😉
I am so “appy” I am learning about new apps to use in my classroom this fall. In a few short weeks, I will get to meet my new 8th graders AND each and every one of them will have an iPad! I love technology, and the way it “levels the playing field”. All of these amazing apps are being created daily, and no one has a monopoly on this kind of know-how. It is so important that teachers work together and share the goodies we find. There are so many great resources out there, it’s overwhelming!
Here are a few apps I can’t wait to try:
Socrative – Goodbye “clickers”! Hello to instant feedback and student-generated data that shows up in my inbox!
Qrafter – No more writing obscure URLs on the board for students to type… and retype when they goof! Students “zap” codes that instantly take them to a website, document, or whatever you want!
Chirp – A colleague (thanks Emily!) shared this with me today, and I just about lost my mind! Chirp makes a custom sound that other mobile devices “hear.” The sound is linked to a URL, document, etc. similar to the way QR codes work… but sound activated instead. I am telling you, you have to see it to believe it! SO COOL!!!!
Please! Share more apps with me! Have you found an app that is so classroom-friendly you can’t wait to try it?
Yes, friends, the summer is moving by oh so quickly! I always say after the fourth of July, the rest of the summer becomes a fast-forward blur. Nonetheless, I find myself getting antsy about the upcoming school year. My brain is shifting from restful mush to inspired reality – in weeks, I will meet a new generation of 8th graders. My next batch of students. This excites me. Call me crazy, but I am one of the ones who gets giddy when I see back-to-school supplies filling the aisles of office supply stores.
Just today, I sit down for a relaxing session of Pinterest-surfing. Somehow, I end up with 27 windows open simultaneously on my computer, each one stemming from the next – a chain reaction of finds that I know I can somehow use in my classroom.
Here are some “pins” I hope to use this year!
1. Tagxedo.com
How cool is this? I am familiar with the Wordle of old, but Tagxedo offers a level of control I haven’t experienced with Wordle. Yes, these word clouds look cool, but I plan to create word banks to inspire students to write and explain mathematics this year. Kids have a hard time explaining their thinking, but with a word bank to help equip them, I think the quality of their explanations will improve. Funky-looking word banks with tools like Tagxedo can’t hurt the process.
2. iPad Inspiration
This presentation offers over 100 ways to implement iPads in the classroom, as well as some troubleshooting tips. With an impending 1-to-1 initiative, I know this will be a helpful resource for me. I hope to blog about my iPad experiences a lot this year. So excited to have such a motivating and cutting-edge resource at my fingertips… literally!
3. Curiosity and the Unexpected
I like to keep kids guessing, and this idea for rewards fits the bill! Homemade scratch-off lottery tickets?!? I better get busy making these now!
As far as blogging, I have been M.I.A. since Pi Day! Here are some stats that may clarify my absence:
1,662 – the number of miles we drove from Allentown to Austin
100 – an under-estimate for the number of Austin homes shown to us by our most gracious realtor
55 – the number of nights we stayed in a hotel suite before closing on a house
15 – the number of days we have been unpacking and settling in to our new house!
144 – the number of awesome 8th graders I teach at Hill Country Middle School
2 – the number of preps I have! (those still teaching in Bethlehem will understand just how amazing this statistic is!)
1/2 – the portion of a John Lemon “Hey Cupcake!” I can consume on SoCo
1/1,000,000 – these opportunities for our family here in Austin, TX!
It has been a non-stop state of busy-body-ness (coining the term in case it doesn’t exist) since we decided to make this move, but I can see sunny days at the pool, Zilker Park, and Barton Springs on the horizon! And if you are wondering, all of those rumors about Austin traffic are true. 😉
Today was a very bittersweet day at Nitschmann Middle School in Bethlehem, PA. “Pi Day and Good-Bye Day” was a celebration I will never forget. I presented each student with a Happy Pi Day greeting card to review the history of pi. Here’s the link: Happy Pi Day Greeting Card I also found some neat pi pencils and gave one to each student. We began the festivities by watching a few videos and listening to pi songs. I challenged students to recite pi from memory! My best competitor memorized 18 digits, but I reigned supreme by reciting 51! We also enjoyed my favorite pi search engine (found here) where students’ birth dates can be entered as a string of digits, and the pi search page tells how many digits into pi the string of numbers occurs consecutively… an annual hit with middle schoolers!
Today was also my last day teaching at Nitschmann Middle School before our family makes our way to a new life and new schools in Austin, Texas. I was humbled and amazed at the outpouring of thanks and appreciation I received from my 160+ students. Cards, gifts, tasty homemade pies and pi cupcakes, student speeches, and even a song written and performed by a student warmed my heart in ways I will never forget! Here are some more class pictures from our day! Thank you Nitschmann!
I shared this presentation with my students today. Mixed reactions… it’s very nice to be appreciated 🙂 The word is out – we’re moving! 🙂
It’s hard to believe that mid-March is approaching! That coveted math holiday that celebrates everyone’s favorite irrational number!
For years, I have given each and every one of my students my very own “Happy Pi Day” greeting card, outlining a brief history of Pi, as well as 2000 digits of pi to study and attempt to memorize 😉 Here’s the card: Happy Pi Day Greeting Card
Here are a few more of my favorite Pi Day resources:
I have especially enjoyed students’ pi songs and pi raps. Last year, I designed a “pi chain challenge” competition to help students visualize how an irrational number “behaves” but in somewhat of a teamwork-type race to create a paper chain representing the digits of pi (details of the activity can be found on my Teachers Pay Teachers page).
Another favorite is this quirky little website entitled “The Pi Searcher” I use a random-reporter strategy to choose a few lucky students, who share the digits of their birth date with the class. I enter the date as a string of consecutive numbers, and voila! If the student’s birth date appears somewhere in pi, the handy-dandy website tells just how far into pi the date appears. Students revel in being the one furthest into pi, or in that rare occasion when a birth date does NOT appear consecutively in pi!
http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery
Can’t wait to sport my t-shirt from a great little restaurant in Virginia Beach called PI-zerria. When I ate there last summer (twice!) the waitress set me up with a huge bag of temporary pi tatoos for my students. (Great pizza “pi” too!)
http://www.pi-zzeria.com/home.aspx
You can’t celebrate Pi Day without playing some pi songs:
Finally, celebrating Pi Day with my students this year will be very bittersweet… more on that later… stay tuned!
With the start of a new calendar year comes that annual “PSSA Panic” for me. Knowing we are several short months away from these all-important high-stakes tests, I look at 40-minute-class-period time constraints, a curriculum overridden with topics, and the never-ending middle school juggling act, being wedged between foundation-setting and too-soon high school topics. Am I teaching middle school mathematics? Or a true Algebra course? Or perhaps a hybrid of both courses in one year, with shorter class periods than ever before? Do I continue to teach content, or do I shift my focus on test taking skills, or both?
Then it dawns on me.
No wonder I am panic-stricken. We are halfway through a school year, and students are being assessed shortly after on an entire year’s worth of content!
My suggestion – either continue to test in March and have the months of April, May and June as an early summer, or give the PSSA in late May!
Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of accountability and consistency. I think high standards and expectations are important. However, now more than ever, defining what middle school mathematics *should* be keeps evolving. Algebra seems to be sneaking to earlier and earlier grades, pushing higher-level content to the late elementary grades as well.
What should a successful middle school mathematics program look like? How do we get there from here?
