*Unfortunately, I do not have a reflection for Week 8 as I was on a hiatus/break haha. November is upon us and reality is beginning to hit home. Number one, report cards are due in 10 days…. Number two, my first parent-teacher interviews are in 15 days… Number three, there are only 34 teaching days left until Christmas! Seriously, was it not just the first day of school last week?!? I guess the only thing to do is take a deep breathe and take one day at a time. In the mean time, here are some things that I think went… Read More
Using Siri in Math Class
Today I was playing around with the Siri application on my iPhone and I discovered that it can solve math problems! Not only does it solve the math problem, but it also visually represents the answer in different ways! I have a few students who have difficulty with realizing that numbers can be shown different ways. For example, the fraction 4/5 can also be written as: – 0.8 (decimal) – 80% (percent) – 8/10 (equivalent fraction) It could also be represented using a: – number line – 100-grid paper – pie chart – cubes or other manipulatives After experimenting… Read More
November Currently
If you haven’t encountered a “Currently” post before, it is just a fun post at the beginning of each month that serves as a way to share what is Currently going on in your life! You can link up and share your own “Currently” post by visiting the wonderful Farley over at Oh’ Boy 4th Grade. November is here and that means that it is almost time for my first parent-teacher experience as a teacher! I feel like this month will fly by with all of the new things that I have to learn, all of the things to prepare for, and all of… Read More
"Open Phone Exams" Response
This week I read a post by George Couros titled, “Open Phone Exams” in which he started off with the following comparison: “If I was to ask a question of an educator and they didn’t know the answer, the tendency would be to google it, or for some, to send out a tweet and ask the question. If they find the answer, they would be considered resourceful. If I was to ask a student a question on an exam, and they did those same things, they would be considered a cheater.“ This immediately got me… Read More
Lets Convert the US to the Metric System! A Grade 10 Essential Math Persuasive Project
Today my Grade 10 Essential Math class was introduced to their unit project to conclude their unit on Measurement Systems. If you can remember back to my previous posts, they created board games as their unit project in their last unit on Personal Finance. Here is what they were tasked with today: – Time For A Change – The United States is the only leading nation not using the metric system, despite doing business with metric countries thousands of times a day. Your mission is to create a persuasive Public Service Announcement (P.S.A) designed to convince the United… Read More
See You In 5 Days…
I only see my Grade 9 math class 3 days a week… Now, I will note that although this is a high-school class, it is not broken into semesters and I will see them all year long. The problem, however, is that these 3 days are back-to-back Monday to Wednesday. This means that my students do not have math for almost 5 full days with the way our class times are laid out. Furthermore, our school functions on a 5-day cycle which means that anytime there is a holiday on a Monday, I only see my students 2 days a week.… Read More
I'm Back!!
After a 9 day hiatus I am finally back in the blogging world. Trust me, it is not for a lack of writing topics… the opposite actually. Since I last posted my life has been a whirlwind of activities: – In-school meetings – Supervising student council dances – Driving 3 hours to watch our football team play their first play-off game – Driving an additional 3 hours to attend a PD session …. …. …. Oh ya… all of those were on the same day actually (but trust me, the remaining days were just as busy. On top of that,… Read More
2 Stars & A Wish: Week 7
This weeks started our back-to-back short weeks as Monday of this week was Thanksgiving and this upcoming Friday is our provincial professional development day, S.A.G.E. This week seemed to go by very quickly even though I didn’t actually teach that much. Most of my classes are nearing the end of their units and I had 2 classes write their unit tests on Friday. Two things that I think went really well this week are: 1 ) Introducing Formal Lab Reports in Science– We have been working with the Scientific Method since the beginning of’ the school year and we have… Read More
#FunShirtFriday 3
One of our school goals is to build in classroom spirit activities/routines for our students as a way to help foster school spirit and classroom community. One activity that I came up with for our class is #FunShirtFriday that I’ve seen on Twitter. Every Friday, I encourage my students to wear a “fun shirt” to school. Over the summer I found a lot of funny and interesting shirts online related to math, science, art, and teaching in general so I was pretty excited to share these with my students. To take this spirit activity one step further,… Read More
These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things…
We’re at that point where the majority of my classes are finishing up their first units and preparing to move on. As such, I wanted to share some of my favourite projects and activities from some of my classes. Grade 8 Art Our first project in Art this year was a Famous Artist Research Mobile. Students picked an artist of their choice, created mobile using their pieces of art, and included artist bio’s and references on the back. These are now laminated and permanent fixtures in my room! Grade 8 Science In Science we explored cells and… Read More