Monday Made It!

Hi Everyone!

I'm finally getting another change to link up with Tara for this month's installment of Monday Made it!

It's been hard to get the motivation to make anything classroom-y, since I haven't been working this year, but this "home made it" could double for a school library. Being a teacher, I usually end up gifting books to all my friend's little ones. This year for birthdays, I decided to do something a little different. I still picked out three books for my little friend, but gave it a twist.

For this birthday, I picked out three of my favourite books, "Chester" by Melanie Watt, "The Pigeon Wants a Puppy" by Mo Willems, and "Click, Clack Moo" by Doreen Cronin. Then, I chose a picture or scene from the book and illustrated it, along with the title of the story. This could also be great (maybe on a smaller scale) for a classroom library. Without further ado, here are the finished products:

(Sorry for the crummy photos, took them with my phone)

I didn't think to take any "during" photos this time around, but basically I eyeballed them in pencil onto the canvas first and then painted. I think they turned out pretty well (except Chester is a little too yellow for me)!

Hope you like them! I hope to be back this week with a couple of freebie math games for you from that never-ending project I've been working on this year. It is finally done and put together. We present tomorrow (wish me luck)!

Have a great week, everyone! Go head over to Fourth Grade Frolics and link up!!

I (heart) Linkies!

Hello again!

Twice in one weekend? What?!? Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend, I spent it working at my P-T job and working on my PBDE project!

Our project is focused on Middle Years math, and helping students with what we identified as the "Top Ten" problem areas for kids (mostly in the "number" strand of math here in Manitoba). So today, I've been working on thinking and researching why basic fact knowledge, factors and multiples, place value, mental math and problem solving are so difficult for kids. It's been interesting, I'm glad that I've found this project valuable so far. Sometimes a lot of it feels like busywork in some courses.

Anyway, the main reason for me writing today is to link up with Ms. M (as an aside, I remember when I used to be a Ms. M! Now I have to settle for being Mrs. T [I'm still coming to terms with trading my awesome last name for a waaaay more popular one!]) over at Teaching is a Gift for her "Blog by Province" linky party.

 

It's nice when you can find Canadian bloggers to visit with sometimes! So if you are reading this, and are a Canadian blogger, go link up! 

Have a great week, everyone!

Generalness and Math

Hey Everyone,

Happy New Year, hope everyone had a relaxing holiday (I know, that break seems like forever ago)! I am coming to the end of a extra-long weekend due to a storm day on Friday (woo hoo)! One of the perks of teaching outside of the city is being able to roll over and go back to sleep after that great phone call while all your friends who teach in the city still have to go to school (sorry, friends)! :)

If you are wondering, no, I still haven't found a job, but I am doing a short stint in a classroom in a school I used to work in for the next week and a half. So I get snow days too. Unfortunately, there were a bunch of things at school that I wanted to take home for the weekend from her classroom to get ready for this week, but I wasn't able to since I wasn't at school. Oh well, I'll take sleeping in, going for breakfast with the hubs and getting my grocery shopping done by 10am.

So I've had a couple of questions about my guided math program that I'm going to try to answer, and later this week (hopefully) I'm going to post about my exciting math-related project I'm doing for my post-bacc course.

Guided Math

So Aviva was asking about problem solving and communication in my guided math groups. One thing to stress with the students when building your guided math routine is how to work when you are not with the teacher. Some of these strategies include the mechanics of station work: how to get and pack up materials, how to move from one area to another, etc. But the other important routines to build with your students are how to work together, how to "help" one another, and how to talk about math. (As a disclaimer, I would like to say that all of my schooling and experience has been in grades 3-7. So some of my ideas may need to be tweaked for first and second graders).

The idea of teaching kids the second set of routines is super important. I don't know how many times I go into classrooms and am trying to help students with a problem, when the next kid in line whispers the answer. They think that they are helping, but really, they are just speeding the process along. This becomes important to kibosh when you are doing g.m. because the students are working alone in their groups without you for 3/4 of the time. One of the preteaching things that I always do is talk about how we can help. I try to teach students to talk about processes, not results. Talk your friend through how you started to solve the problem, or important words, or where to look to find the info you need to begin. I find, especially at the middle grades, that this is difficult for kids. They don't want to show their work, or talk about strategies; teaching them how to do this effectively is super important (and for little kidlets too, that way they'd be used to it by grade 5)! :)

For problem solving, I would start off as a whole group, and go through strategies to use. We would probably start with different problems that would use the same strategy. I used a program called "Problem Solver 6". What I might do in the future is to give each group a problem once a week when they meet with me. Then in one of their breakoff groups (paper/pencil, or instead of fact practice) I would get them to take turns talking about the steps that they would use to solve the problem, or maybe give each group a different type of problem, and have them be 'experts' on that type of problem to teach the rest of the class.

As I said, so much of it is about pre-teaching these routines. Like in the Daily 5 program, you have to start small, and definitely teach kids the language, expectations and routines. You might not get into fully operating guided math groups until November. But that's okay. All that preparation means that it will run so much smoother later on.

Hope that helps! Any questions, ask 'em in the comments!

As a final note on this incredibly long post, I need to share this picture, which may finally help me to remember what the difference between mean, median and mode is. I shared it with a group of grade sixers on Thursday and they were repeating it all morning!








Take care!

School (the other kind)!

Welcome back!

So last time I mentioned something about having some more news.

So over the past few months, I've hemmed and hawed over the idea of heading back to university and doing a few courses. On one hand, I didn't want to do it because as someone who has two degrees adding up to six years of university, going back and doing a full year's worth of courses would 'bump me up' the pay scales in my province. Teachers here only need to have 5 years of schooling, so I'm already more expensive than other people with the same years of experience as I have. I didn't know if this would be an issue at hiring.

On the other hand, one of my eventual goals is to qualify to become a resource teacher, especially as there have been a number of postings over the last while looking for those lovely people. What I really wanted to do was qualify as a Teacher of the Deaf/hoh, but apparently I missed that boat by a few months at my home university when they offered it as a "one time only" course! :(

So, long story short, I've applied to go back to school to work on my PBDE (Post-Baccalaureate Diploma in Education). I figure that professional development and life-long learning can't be looked at as detrimental to an applicant, even if it makes me a little pricier. :)

So I'm pretty excited to go back to school! One of my friends is also taking the course I want, and I know the professors for both halves! The first one is a prof I had during my undergrad and the second is the former vp from my first school! Yay!

Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end!

Anyone else heading back to university this year?


'Til next time!