One of my many faults as a teacher is that I forget to give students the roadmap to where we are going. I am good at connecting what we are doing now to what we learned before and building on prior knowledge and I completely have a roadmap in my head- I just need to share it with them. Day one I am doing fun getting to know you/ data collection activities with them… but I am working on Prezi roadmaps for my “What is this course about and what are the classroom expectations” portion of day 2. Looking for feedback! For my Numeracy course, which I am considering calling “Number Theory” in an effort to make it sound fancy and like a separate course instead of a support course. The classroom norms come from JoBoaler's Week of Inspirational Math and I love how this Prezi template looks like her You Read the full post...

I was on a massive road trip this summer and since my husband loves to drive I spent loads of time leisurely perusing Twitter. I have spent the last few hours going back to my “to do” list that I made via favoriting the tweets. Lots of inspiration to start the school year right! Read the full post...

Here are some of the “mental math” activities that I used with my Numeracy students last year, which I will refer to as a “Warm Up” in the year to come. Students would engage in this work individually after they responded to the exit ticket reflection prompt. We would then discuss the “mental math” activity as a whole class, which then would lead into the “lesson launch.” I tried to have the skills developed in the “mental math” activity be ones that would be helpful to them during their group work. The one pictured below was used as a precursor to a lesson about how their GPA is calculated. Thank you visual patterns! Thank you estimation 180! *Apparently there is a month “44” April Fools? * Thank you Transition to Algebra! a Thank you Steve Wyborney! I Read the full post...

Students come back to school in five days. And that's a day after teachers report for the year. This is my 10th first day of school and I still have a “How will I combat first period lateness” crisis. If anyone has any ideas- I am open. I am making a commitment RIGHT NOW to blogging more. Blogging will serve as my co teacher, my student teacher. For the first two years of teaching, I was in the ninth grade initiative where the 300 students had either myself or Danielle and we would talk through and plan everything together every afternoon. Then, we would have phone calls every night and a pow wow every morning in the copy center. The next two years I taught Geometry with Erica. Again, we planned and debriefed and scoped and sequenced every day. E-mails late at night and early in the morning and on the weekends. Read the full post...

Here is a pretty cool google doc with lots of resources worth checking out: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kN-QlXQNo10hTpPsgFtdk8fcErYhrwr55DUSqKN0MZk/edit#gid=1944957823 Read the full post...