At the start of October I signed up to participate in #MTBoS as a way to connect with more math educators and learn about different strategies/activities that could help me as a first year math teacher. I’m not exactly sure what I did wrong, but I signed up to get the weekly challenges emailed to me and added their wordpress blog to my Feedly account and for some reason I never got any updates! 8 weeks later… I noticed that a few of the bloggers that I follow have jumped on the #MTBoS wagon and are blogging about week… Read More
Stanley the Koosh Ball!
This post is for all of you that have a SMART Board or other brand of Interactive Whiteboard in your classroom. Did you know that you can use a “Koosh Ball” to activate your board and, thus, create a kinesthetic learning opportunity for your students? Before I graduated with my B.Ed I spent a lot of time substitute teaching in a Kindergarten class near our home. As part of their morning calendar time, students reviewed months/days/years by activating review prompts on their SMART Board with a “Koosh Ball”. These rubbery balls are the perfect sensory tools if you 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
#FunShirtFriday 2
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
#FunShirtFriday
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
Interactive Notebooks in Math
This summer I was introduced to the idea of Interactive Notebooks in math class through Jennifer at 4mula Fun. As a first year math teacher, I’m always looking for different assessment ideas and the setup of Interactive Notebooks seemed like an interesting instructional method that would provide an easy assessment option for me. Fast forward to the end of September and I’ve officially implemented Interactive Notebooks (INB) into all three of my math classes at the Grade 8, 9 & 10 levels. After searching through different edublogs I’ve found a lot of different ways in which teachers are using… Read More
Resources To Start Off Your Week 79
You might have noticed that a lot of my posts lately have discussed the math classes that I am teaching. Of the 6 courses, I have 3 math classes (Grade 8, 9 & 10). As such, here are two AWESOME math-related resources to start off your week! As always, I will be adding these to my lists of resources under the Fav Websites heading. 1 ) Resource Lists To Accompany Grade 8: Math Makes Sense– If your school has the Math Makes Sense set of textbooks from Pearson then you might find this website really helpful! The Hastings & Prince … Read More
Interactive "Connect With Us" Display
I am now spending almost every day in my classroom getting organized and prepared for the upcoming school year. As you know, I’ve created quite a strong online presence for my classroom and I want to make sure that my students utilize these resources and have easy access to them. To address this, I’ve created an interactive Connect With Us display at the entrance of my classroom! This display includes 3 laptops featuring the information for our: – Classroom Website – Classroom Blog – Classroom YouTube Channel In addition to the written URL for each site, I… Read More
Blog, Website, or Both?
Our school year begins in less than two months and I am spending this summer trying to get as organized as possible. In addition to the million-and-one things that are required of teachers, I know that I want to have my students blogging as well as have a classroom website. I have two science classes, Grade 7 & Grade 8, who I want to start blogging projects with. These are two of my smaller classes as I am nervous that I will get too overwhelmed if I tried to get ALL 7 of my different subject-area… Read More
mRLC Backwards-By-Design Planning
If you are a teacher in Manitoba who is also utilizing backwards-by-design planning then you definitely need to check out the resources available through the Manitoba Rural Learning Consortium (mRLC). My principal shared this with us this week and I am so glad she did because it is going to save me a lot of work in my planning! The backwards-by-design method of planning (sometimes called understanding-by-design, backwards planning, or planning with the end in mind) involves planning out the “big ideas” or main goals for a topic first, then selecting the best assessment options, and finally determing instructional methods… Read More