days of happiness, day 1

In various places online, I've seen the 8 days of happiness meme (I don't remember exactly what it's called). Essentially, for eight straight days, the blogger posts something from the day that made them happy. I think I'm going to try to do this -- but with photos! Much more interesting!



My desk drawers aren't always clean, but I try very hard to keep the top of it clean and uncluttered. It makes me feel more centered and I can get work done there. score!


This math solution just rocks my world. With my class, I do a lot of "energizers" -- little songs/activities to wake us up when we're getting a bit glazed over. One energizer is the 5-4-3-2-1 shake, where we shake our left hand five times (and count to 5), then shake our right hand five times, then left foot, then right foot. Then we do them all again with 4, 3, 2, and then 1. Well, in Math today, their challenge was to figure out how many times they shook their hands, how many times they shook their feet, and how many times they shook them all. The kids could use whatever tools they needed to solve the problem and they could work independently or with a partner.

They had some truly amazing strategies for solving they problem, which they also were able to explain to others. This image I love because you can see they used tally marks, but ALSO made groups of 5 with the tallies so they could count them easier, then they used groups of ten to count 30 + 30.

This is the kind of thing I always want to show to people when they claim that public schools are failing and horrible places for children to be. Not in my classroom, ladies and gentlemen. Not in my classroom. ♥