S.E.L. Dice

In the fall of 2019, as part of a regular professional development day in October my district had someone come in and work with us on Social Emotional Learning Standards. We participated in activities, collaborated and I left feeling ready to come up with some ways to more intentionally teach and reinforce social emotional learning in my classroom.

Dice

I spent the weekend reading through the materials and came up with an idea of S.E.L. dice. I found a template and printed it out on 6 different colors of thick colored paper, put the activities I thought I could manage on them and printed up a key for myself. Each table bin in my 8th grade classroom got a single die and we used them regularly. My original project is linked below. The GREAT things about it.

Shifts of Functions Project

This year during our virtual learning time, I took a project that I usually offer for extra credit and made it a class assignment. I decided that with the time we were all spending at home because there are no sports, in person social gatherings, concerts or opportunities to be out and about that it was the perfect time for kids to get to dive into a creative project. Algebra students had just finished studying shifts of functions, and we culminated that experience with a project.

The details

The project was a creative one. It had a simple goal: You will create an original piece of work using graphs from many “families of functions” as characters in your story. My hope for you in this project is that it is FUN, CREATIVE, and that it brings you JOY! Formats permitted include: poster, book or booklet, digital document, mixed media. The story required 6 pages or scenes and may be any genre. Ideas for topics include: How to book, original children’s storybook, existing children’s storybook, recipe book, current events, Anime or sports.

Quadratic Formula Song

Normally when we learn in our actual classroom space when we get to learn the Quadratic formula in Algebra, I have the song playing as the students come in. This is not my original idea – in fact I learned the song when my daughter took Algebra. Her teacher played it day in and day out for them.

This year we were in our virtual learning environment when it was time to learn the formula. Naturally I still wanted to follow the tradition and play the song. However, when I went to find the song, I found A LOT of songs. There was the catchy, familiar version that I know and love set to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel” but there were also so many others out there. People sang it to the tune of Rolling in the Deep, there were rap versions and more. I found a few and popped them into a playlist on my YouTube channel and shared them with my students.

Math Memes

In the spring of 2019 I gave the students an assignment to create their own math memes with partners. These memes have been hanging on one of our hallway bulletin boards for the first couple months of this year. Here is a picture of our board. The kids did a really great job finding inspiration online and then creating their own versions! Check out all the pictures below. You can click on them to get a better view!

Meet our 7th Graders

7th grade is a year filled with a lot of excitement for kids! In Trumansburg it is the kids’ 3rd year of middle school, BUT this year is also the first opportunity to play modified sports. It is a year that kids are faced with balancing their work-load a little more as well. Like any year, they are learning more about themselves and what they enjoy in school.

In our school we have large bulletin boards in our hallways and thanks to our PTO they are now painted vibrant colors. Our floor’s boards are red! As part of 7th grade, I use our popsicle sticks from class to randomly invite two students for an “interview” every other Wednesday during lunch. These students can invite up to 3 friends each to join the group. We enjoy lunch and I bring in a big cookie for each student as they share about their favorite things in 7th grade.

Whiteboard Equation Solving

You can use water-based markers on a whiteboard

It was a happy accident last year. A student (or maybe it was me I don’t actually remember) wrote on our classroom whiteboard in marker. Not dry erase marker. Oh dear!! We’ll have marker on our board forever, I thought. Before panicking though I grabbed some paper towels and a water spray bottle and was so happy to see that it came off!!

This mistake prompted me to use it as a teaching tool in the classroom.

Thank you Middle School PTO for our calculators!

Calculators are a must have in seventh grade math class. Mrs. Dawson has math classes all throughout the day, and has found a system for making sure that calculators are always available when you need them. The students were asked to buy calculators, as well as the PTO kindly buying enough for everyone to use during class. They are a part of our shared bins on every table, which also includes highlighters, pens, sticky notes, scissors, pencil sharpeners and erasers. Most of these items the students were asked to help supply the classroom with, and they are definitely being put to good use.

A locker organizing idea

The other day I was standing outside my room and I saw one of my student’s lockers. It has a nice little bin of pencils so that he will always arrive prepared for class. I asked Adam if I could take a picture of his locker and he happily obliged.

Trello for Tutoring (2017)

In this post I’m going to share how I have used Trello as a great tool for tutoring students one on one. Last year I tutored several students, and to keep everything that they were doing straight I decided to start to store things in Trello. In doing so, I found out that it worked as a wonderful back and forth tool for us to communicate, share work and ask questions.

Each student interacted a little bit differently with it, and that is one thing that I found really fun and interesting. If you are a tutor, I think that you’ll find Trello really helpful for managing things. This post will share the things that I found most useful. I hope that you find it helpful.