days of happiness, day 2

day two of things that make me happy (with pictures)


More math. If you read the problem my students solved yesterday, you'll note that the solution to the problem was 60. Yesterday I'd challenged Antonio to figure out how many shakes it would be if two people did the energizer. So, he ran out of time yesterday but today he asked if he could work on it.

Not long after, he came to me to tell me that it was 120 shakes, because he knew that "40 was inside 60 and there was 20 left" and that he also knew that 60 and 40 made 100, so 100 and 20 was 120.

Yup. My students, ladies and gentlemen. Showing brilliance on Wednesday afternoons.


This one I love because of what came out of it. My class has really grabbed onto the idea of squishing words together. We use it to encourage word play and the use of other words to help them spell new ones (ie, if you know how to spell "make" you know how to spell snake and rake). Sometimes, at Morning Meeting, I might put the Greeting and Activity together, and we call it a "greetivity"

This afternoon we were clearing off the easel so we could put up our cooperative posters to share. The easel looked like this. Then Nijjar said, "don't forget to move the fragnet."

"The fragnet?" I asked.

"Frog. And magnet. The fragnet."

hahahahahahahaha, yes! How did I not think of that?

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. ♥

thinking ahead...

What I've been thinking a lot about recently is the need to really sit next to my students as they're working, to observe and watch them, to see what's going on without automatically jumping in and talking to them about it.

Case in point: Yesterday, Eva was working to solve this problem:

Four children are going to paint a wall. They will paint ¼ red, ¼ blue, ¼ yellow, and ¼ green.
Show how the wall might look.

[NOTE: there was a rectangle drawn below the problem.]

She'd already solved the previous problem (painting the wall half red & half blue) correctly and was working on this one quite dilligently. She had a blue colored pencil and had colored in about one fifth of the rectangle (vertically) and was looking at it thoughtfully.

Then, she looked around and saw that some other children were sectioning off their rectangles using pencils, so she took a pencil and looked back at the rectangle. After a moment or two, she started drawing lines to make different sections.

At about that moment, one of the other students needed my attention, so I called them over and spoke to them about their work, then turned back to watch Eva.

"Miz F," she said, her eyebrows wrinkling, "if I make another line there, it will be five."

"Show me what you mean," I said.

She showed me how she'd drawn another two lines to divide the rectangle into four parts with a larger space left over. So, if she drew another one (so they were all equidistant and had equal spaces), there would be five sections of the wall instead of four.

"It's too much spaces," she said.

"I wonder if you could make the blue area bigger -- would that help?"

"I'll see," she said.

Eva then proceeded to extend the blue section, draw two more lines to make four equal sections, then colored them in.

When she was done, she grinned at me and pointed to her work. "I have four equal parts," she said proudly.

The reason this has been on my mind for the past day is simply this: I have to make the time to listen to the children as they're working. I have to keep my own mouth shut more often and let their own thinking be the guide.

The thing is, Eva has a tough time learning. She has a lot stacked against her in life right now, and it's pretty easy for her to get frustrated. This time, though, she didn't get frustrated. She didn't just attack the problem, she thought ahead to what needed to happen next and realized that it wasn't going to be correct. Sure, she used a push from me to get back on track, but who is to say that she wouldn't have found that push on her own?

And you know what? Now we get to think back on that moment. We get to use Eva as a model for thinking ahead when you're working (and not just in math!) and thinking critically to make sure that you're solving the problem that you're trying to solve.

Pretty powerful as far as I'm concerned.

planning ahead...

Someone once said to me that good teachers should be planned ahead two weeks at a time.

I'm not sure why that sticks in my head, but while I think I agree in theory, I'm not sure it actually makes sense to follow that to the letter.

Here's an example. In our school, the First Grade team has developed a set of Yearly Plans. Our Social Studies/Science plan is a bit more comprehensive than the Language Arts one, and really, they are all just works in progress. With Math, we've been following our Math curriculum (for some, Silver Burdett-Ginn. For me, Investigations), so the Math yearly plan was almost empty.

Well, this year, our school system has mandated that all teachers follow the Mathematics Pacing Guide that they've created, which pulls Standards of Learning from the State's website and blocks them out into the various quarters of the school year. (My objection to the way they've blocked some of them out, ie, focusing on counting only in the first quarter and no combining or separating, is a discussion for another time)

So, this year, I've been using the Investigations curriculum, but far less than I'm used to. With a focus on counting (by 1's, 2's, 5's, 10's), number recognition, and etc... I've been inventing a lot of the work that my students are doing [example here, though pictures are missing. :( ].

Yes, I'm planning 1-2 weeks in advance... but every week what I plan changes. I may say that I'm going to do a particular investigation into counting by 5's on a certain day, but it changes based on what I'm seeing the children do (both in what they are capable of and that with which they need more practice).

Isn't that the point, really? To plan ahead, but to tweak and change and throw out entirely lessons that are not appropriate, and instead work with the children where they are, not where I thought we'd be two weeks ago...