Five Great Things for November 17, 2015

Well after losing a lot of sleep last night due to a crying baby and toddler deciding 3 AM was time to play, I will start off today's good things with just making it through the day.

• I made it through the day.
• Students did an excellent job of taking notes on the characteristics of civilization. 
• Students in math became curious about the order of operations which is our next topic. This is great so they will hopefully be able to learn them easier since they are already curious about it.  This happened organically though some classwork that involved some different operations, and I made a mistake in the problem. So we had to figure out how to fix my mistake and learned the appropriate order of operations. 
• Most students were working hard and diligently at listening to their dystopian novel and writing down questions to discuss in groups. 
• I am starting to get some comfort level with the content on Mesopotamia and early civilizations from teaching, research, and planning. Thus allowing me to maybe start creating some video lectures to help students access the information and apply it in a way to fits our unit and standards. 

Tomorrow is student led conferences after school. I hope to find a chance to write a post, but they last until 6. Let's hope I can get on here and post five great things!

Five Great Things for November 16, 2015

Today  had plenty of great things so I'll try to capture a few of them in these five.

• I successfully met with "small groups" that were large, provided some instruction, took an exit ticket and lowered the group size down to something more manageable to work in small groups with. There were some students who were having trouble adding integers and determine how to handle each problem based on the signs of the numbers. So we reviewed, did an exit ticket on an index card, and I called back to the small group table those who still needed a bit more help to review some more. 
• Students have really grown in their ability to take two and three column notes. I am seeing a lot more engaged and focused note taking. This is good because I feel like my modeling is starting to pay some small dividends. 
• I managed to record a math video on dividing rational numbers with my new stylus pen and it was awesome. I can't wait to keep using this pen to make more videos. I'm really doing well with this work flow and this pen will make the videos easier for students to understand. My handwriting is messy enough with a pen. Having to decipher it when I write with my finger is tough. 
• I reached out again to all my parents to schedule student led conferences. I have almost 100% scheduled.
• I am working on a second week of daily reflections listing five great things about the day. It is a fantastic way for me to reflect, highlight the positive, and head home on a good note.

See you all tomorrow! 

Five Great Things for November 13, 2015

Today went really well! Doesn't ever day? Here are five things that were great today.

• I again started math class on time and told every student they mattered.
• In math we worked on a puzzle and students really persevered through the problem even though is was pretty big and challenging. I told them how awesome that was of them.
• I met with all of my "literature circle" groups this week. Yeah, I know if I'm meeting with them it isn't literature circles. I'm modifying it to help build success later in the year. 
• I found a problem in my schedule and have a plan to change it. Just switching which groups I pull during daily 5 time to make sure students are all here for their group.
• I have more than half my students done with their portfolios and ready to plan their student led conference on Monday afternoon! The rest are close to finishing as well, we were mentally drained from all the intense reflecting today!

I do have a question I need to work on finding the answer to though. While I am trying to create every day and share my positive thoughts (mainly to build my own positivity muscle), I would like to share with the world. I need to find a way to quickly tweet out my blog posts when I make them. Maybe the If This Then That thing I have heard about? I'll explore that next week. Have a great weekend!

Five Great Things November 12, 2015

So looking at three days in a row ... does that count as one of the great things? It always could!

• I was able to start math class on time again, starting with a ten minute warm up/greeting. This is where students rewatch last nights homework video, work on finish/starting notes (if they didn't do them), and I check homework. Most importantly I individually tell each student that they matter. It seems like a silly thing, but the kids actually enjoy and appreciate it. 
• We made some more growth and progress in setting up our digital portfolios and one student has uploaded and reflected on the six main pieces of work needed for our student led conferences!
• The students suggested that we change our writing assignment to writing about characters they are more interested in (I had assigned a text to read from). So we are going to be writing about the characters from our Dystopian novels instead. I look forward to hearing about the characters from The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Giver. 
• I have established some healthy workflow routines in creating math and word study videos. This includes videos for five word study groups. Although I usually can use old videos for 2/5 groups so I'm only making three a week. Basically I'm averaging 3 math, and 3 word study videos created each week. It is feeling pretty manageable at this point too. 
• My parents are coming to visit the our new baby this weekend and are arriving a day before we expected them!

Here to to coming back tomorrow to write five more things! Have a great day!

5 Great Things For 11/11/15

Today reflecting back on five great things that were accomplished today.

• I actually am making this post again. Yay!
• We rolled out digital portfolios and every student started their portfolio including three subpages for their work.
• I found a few resources on Ancient Greece for student research and to teach from.
• Met with a book story group and received some good feedback about a teaching strategy involving listing prior knowledge and then crossing out misconceptions as you learn about the topic. You also then add in what you learn in another column. 
• I contacted all the parents who hadn't signed up for Student Led Conferences to try to get them to sign up.

On that note, time to get ready for tomorrow!

Five Great Things for 11/10/15

Today I noted five great things that happened in my classroom. Here are are:

• 100% of the students got out their agendas upon arrival to school prior to our morning meeting.
• Students for Math entered the room and began reviewing the previous video/notes while I checked homework and greeting students. We were able to start math promptly ten minutes after students entered the room. 
• Most groups in math were able to correctly identify the rules for products while multiplying integers. Two positive factors is a positive product, one positive and one negative factor is a negative product, and two negative factors is a positive product. 
• Almost the entire class completed notes on interactive maps about the Fertile Crescent and Ancient Egypt. They used a new strategy where they generate prior knowledge or predictions in one column then add what they learn in a second column. Students then crossed out, checked, or placed question marks by their prior knowledge to indicate if it was confirmed, a misconception, or still not sure. 
• During our Daily 5 work time two reading groups successfully met with me. 

Woohoo! Great work today!

Busy Work to Grade?

I have left this blog to the side while I rearrange some priorities in my life and made some significant changes. I wanted to put up a quick post and assure anyone who does follow this I am working on a series of posts about some of my thoughts on the differences in education I've noticed in working in 4 different states professionally and two more if you include student teaching. For now my post is short and poses a question I'm not sure many teachers ask themselves.

Picture yourself overwhelmed with work, say for example grading. You go home at night and you have your family to tend to. You mange to get dinner on the table and the kids aren't throwing a fit. In fact you found a way to keep them busy by letting them watch TV (or insert of activity designed to keep kids occupied and out of your hair). Now you finally have a chance to sit down and do that grading (or what ever other work you brought home). What a relief to be able to accomplish it and your family is perfectly happy. It feels great to be so productive.

Turn this around ... You are in your classroom and found an activity that keeps all of your students occupied, on task, and happy.  Great, now you can go sit down and grade papers.  Wait? Is that what is defined as quality teaching? Yet as teachers we can define that same practice as quality parenting? What would you do give your students busy work so you could grade? Or give your own children busy work so you could grade?

My personal response is that I more often do things to keep my son busy so I can sneak off to "do business" as he puts it. Mainly because it is so frowned upon professionally to keeps kids busy during class time allowing us to do work that can be done outside of class time. I know one priority I have in my head, but don't enforce much, is that my own children are higher on the list than my students. If I were to give students busy work and grade papers it would be doing work at work, so it's not like I'm getting paid to do nothing. Then I'm freeing myself up to spend more time mentally and physically invested in my family.

It's like in education it is frowned upon to try and accomplish any work that can be done when students aren't there while students are there. Doing this may leave us with large burdens to take care of outside of work hours. Which then makes us practice the exact same thing with our own families. Why do educators do this?