When I was student teaching, I had my students complete assessments of me as a teacher. This was not something I was required to do but it was a big learning opportunity for me so I continued doing it throughout my last year of my Education Degree. I actually got the idea from Larry Ferlazzo’s blog (here is his most-recent example). When student teaching, my evaluation questions were centered around the statements/categories that were included in my evaluation checklists from my university. Now that I am out of school and have my own classroom I am not sure… Read More
Report Card Reflections
Today our Semester 1 Report Cards went home with students and I could breathe a sigh of relief. The past two weeks have been emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausting as I’ve attempted to survive my first report card experience as a first year teacher. To be honest, I don’t feel like there was any one aspect that was genuinely hard (although they were time consuming). The most difficult part, for me, was making sure I actually did everything that was required of me. I felt like there was a lot of aspects that I simply wasn’t aware of, so… Read More
Making Time…
This past month has been a weird one for me as it has been the first month in almost two years where I haven’t been blogging regularly. They say that if something is important to you, you will find a way to make time for it…. My viewpoint towards my blog has not changed. In fact, my time away from my blog made me realize how much it truly meant to me. So much has been happening in my teaching-life over the past few weeks and there has been several times where I have wanted to share it with… Read More
Visualizing the Circulatory System
We are currently discussing the circulatory system in Gr 8 science as we near the end of our Cells & Systems unit. Today my students had an opportunity to learn some interesting facts about this system through some activities: The Box of MysteryWhen students arrived, I had a large Rubbermaid storage bin on the table. After taking a few guess about what was inside, we blindly pulled items from the box until each student had an item (they were all containers of various shapes and sizes). Without giving any insight, I asked students to find somewhere in the school… Read More
2 Stars & a Wish: Week 9
*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