150 Follower Giveaway!

I know, I know, 150 is not a huge blogger milestone....BUT, I'm thankful for every one of my sweet followers! And besides, it's a great excuse to give away some free stuff.

And I have two sweet bloggers who have joined in the fun with me. Kelly from An Apple for the Teacher and Brigid from Bits of First Grade are both giving away any one item from her TpT store. Just click the picture links below to do some browsing. Thank you so much ladies for helping out!

 

I'll be giving away 3 items from my TpT store to round things out to a nice package of 5 items! Giveaway starts today and ends on Sunday.

Thanks to each and every follower!

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Guess My Number Winner....AND another Giveaway

I spent all day with a local school district (I teach at a private school, so we don't have any partner schools to collaborate with) taking part in Thinking Maps training. It was beyond amazing! If you haven't heard of Thinking Maps you have to check it out here. 

Tomorrow and Thursday will be all day training as well, so this will be short and sweet since it's already past my bed time.

The winner of the Guess My Number Challenge is Lori, with the guess 43 (my favorite birthday number). Lori will get a copy of the Guess My Number activity...and because I'm so thankful for the other ladies who played along, I'm sending them a copy too!!

I also hit 150 followers today so a giveaway will be coming soon for that. Stay tuned.

 

Building Mathematical Comprehension- Chapter 1

I'm so excited that it's time for Chapter 1 of the Building Mathematical Comprehension book study. A big thanks to Brenda at Primary Inspired and Beth at Thinking of Teaching for starting the study and for hosting week one!

My husband always says that I take for-ev-er to get to the point of what I'm trying to say...I of course don't think that's true; I think he's just being a man about it...but in the event that he's right...which of course rarely happens (I know he won't be reading this so I can say that!)...I'll be giving you the straight to the point, no fuss, no muss version each week. I've included my personal thoughts and reflections in italics for your reading pleasure {ha!}.

Here are my take away points from Chapter 1:

Mathematics Goal: Teach students to use mathematics for functional uses (19).

I need to help my students make real world connections between the math we do in class and their everyday lives!

Reaching that Goal:

• build consistency with instructional strategies across content areas (in the case of this book, reading strategies applied to mathematics) (21)

I need to be aware of the strategies that I use in one subject and identify how they can be used consistently across content areas. This book is a great start!

 

• create a consistent vocabulary to maximize effectiveness (21)

Consistent strategy vocabulary will ease confusion and will help with the implementation of strategies across content areas.

 

• teach the structure of word problems similar to how you would teach the structure of a narrative or expository text (25)

Duh! We do this in reading, why wouldn't we do it when approaching problem solving. Maybe teach students how to give word problems a mini or simplified close read. 

 

• to increase confidence and willingness to try, acknowledge the various ways students will attempt problem solving as opposed to expecting one way to arrive at the solution  (25)

I have to remember to encourage students to be creative in their approaches to problem solving. Many times you can arrive at the correct answer in a variety of ways. I have to nurture every road that students take to get to that answer.

 

• give students credit for trying every problem and showing their work versus only giving credit for correct answers; this will increase persistence towards mathematical tasks (26-27)

My partner teacher and I grade all math work for accuracy. {thumbs down!} After reading this chapter and watching some videos from Rick Wormeli {fabulous, and a thumbs up!!} I hope to be changing that next year. Maybe a post on that coming soon?

 

• teach strategies explicitly using 6 steps quoted by Sammons (31):

1. Explain WHAT the strategy is
2. Explain WHY the strategy is important
3. Explain WHEN to use the strategy
4. MODEL the strategy (without student involvement)
5. GUIDE students while they practice the strategy
6. Let students use the strategy INDEPENDENTLY

I've always been a fan of explicit instruction, modeling, think-alouds, and such so this is an encouraging first step for me.

 

Of course there are so many more important things discussed in this chapter. I highly recommend you get a copy and join in the study.

See you next week for Chapter 2: Recognizing and Understanding Mathematical Vocabulary   

SIDE NOTE: I'm giving a day or two more for my Guess My Number Giveaway. Read and enter here. 

Goals and Guess My Number Giveaway

Last year my goal was to focus on improving the way I teach writing, science, and history. I did a lot more writing, which was fabulous. For science we started science journals, although we didn't use them that consistently. In history, I slowed down the pace and used a lot more visual aids and charts. 

This year my focus is on improving math and writing, while continuing the improvements that I started this past school year. This is why I'm so excited about the math book study that I'm doing (more on that tomorrow!). It has even inspired me to do some more TpT creating. 

My plan is to go chapter by chapter and create fun and exciting ways to reinforce our math lessons. Our first chapter is on place value. It seems that many students come to me with weak number sense, so this Guess My Number activity will get them reasoning about numbers. 

Students will read through the clues and reason about what digits are in each place. 

Then they record their number on the recording sheet. The pack includes an alternate recording sheet that does not have the lines, but the lines are a great scaffold for students that need it.

I hope to have more place value activities coming soon. For now, I'll be giving away a copy of this to the first person to Guess My Number. It just happens to be my favorite one!

The details: 
-Only make one guess (the clues are open ended enough that it could be a few different answers)  
-You must be a follower of my blog
-You must agree that if you win, you will host your own Guess My Number giveaway on your blog (if you have one). I'll send this to the winner of your giveaway as long as they are following both of our blogs. 

Here are your clues:

My number has 2 digits.
The digit in the tens place is one more than the number in the ones place.
It is an odd number.


Good luck!! *UPDATE* Guessing is closed. The winner is Lori :)

WINNERS! 100 Follower Giveaway

I'm so excited to announce the winners of my 

 

Congratulations to:

Carolyn who won my Birdie Nameplates and Calendar Accents.

Layla who won an item from Surfing to Success' TpT Store.

Hope who won an item from An Apple for the Teacher's TpT Store.

Sara who won The Gypsy Teacher's Homophone Match and Patch.

Heather who won a Polka Dot Owl Classroom Super Pack from First Grade Fascination. 

WHEW! That was fun. Not a bad way to start off your week ladies!

Thanks to everyone who entered. And congratulations again to our winners. Watch your emails for your prizes. 

Happy Monday!

Back To School PowerPoint Presentation

Meghan over at Third Grade in the First State is flippin' out after reaching 200 followers and is having an awesome giveaway. You don't want to miss this one!

 

I'm also flippin' out because she's so sweet and let me be part of her giveaway. 

One of her prizes includes a customizable Back to School PowerPoint presentation made by ME! Yay!

The presentation includes 24 slides setup so you can input your own information.  Here are a few of the slides included. 

Now hurry over to enter Meghan's giveaway and then make sure you have these two fonts installed and ready to go, ya know, just in case you win!

Minya Nouvelle

(dafont.com)

Digs My Hart

(kevinandamanda.com)

*If you don't have these installed, I'm pretty sure PowerPoint 

will default to a potentially way less cute font.

Keep the cute. Install the fonts.

A Dish Drying Rack Filing System

Last year I came across this darling "on the go" organization system (made with a drying rack for dishes!) on Pinterest. You can find the original source here.

 

I had high hopes that this would solve my at-home paperwork dilemma. After much searching, I found the drying rack at Target, but only in black. And then I couldn't find very cute folders...although I didn't search all that hard. I never got around to labeling it, I did shove some papers into it, but it mostly collected junk.

When I walked into the Dollar Tree today and stumbled upon these cutesie folders I just knew my junk collector needed another shot at fulfilling its purpose.

 

Hopefully its purpose this time around will be to provide me with a place to store my daily folders, To Grade folder, and To File folder. Is that totally weird to file papers in a file, and then eventually file those same papers elsewhere?! 

Logic would tell you just file them where they belong the first time. I've lived with me for many years and I can tell you right now that ain't gonna happen! I'm hoping this intermediate place will help. 

Here it is all put together.

 

Now if that's not screaming PIN ME then I don't know what is! I love how it came out. (Please un-notice that I don't have my files labeled {again}. Thanks!)

Be sure to join in my giveaway before you hop on outta here.

100 Follower Giveaway!

I cannot tell you how enriching it has been to be a part of this online teaching community. Everyone that I have "met" has been so generous with their time, resources, and knowledge. So a HUGE thank you is in order to all of you who have helped me reach this amazing point...100 followers! 

To celebrate I'm teaming up with some fab gals to offer some great resources in my...

 

I'll be giving away this set of nameplates and calendar accents.

You also have the chance to grab a TpT item from Mercedes at Surfing to Success

A TpT item from Kelly at An Apple for the Teacher

A Classroom Super Pack from Rebecca at

and a Homophone Match and Patch from Allie at

Thank you ladies for your generosity 

and willingness to help with the giveaway!

Help show these ladies some love by checking out their blogs and shops and following along. I look forward to reading your comments!

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A "Maddening" Giveaway

Amanda from Teaching Maddeness started her blog only 18 days ago and I am honored to be her 235th follower. Congratulations Amanda!

In celebration of passing the 100 follower milestone, she is offering a giveaway that you do not want to miss. In conjunction with Teacher's Clubhouse, she is giving away:

A FREE UNIT of YOUR CHOICE from TC,

EVERYTHING in one of TC's classroom theme categories (your choice of theme)
AND
a $25 giftcard from Barnes & Noble!!  

You only have 2 more days to join in. The fun ends on June 23rd! Don't miss it.