Welcome Year Three~

Welcome back! My third year of teaching started on September 9th 2015. I'm certainly not a complete beginner anymore but I feel like I still have plenty of work to do. I have awesome students this year that are excited about being 6th graders, excited to be in a new school with new friends and new teachers. To start the year off I decided to lightly introduce scavenger hunts in my class where students get a chance to work together, move around and solve math problems. Take a look below!

Human Ordering Integers!

We have been working very hard lately on unit 3. This unit is about children beginning to understand negative and positive numbers as well as the contexts in which they play a role in the real world. Here is a short clip of one of the fun activities we've been doing recently in class (I must admit, even I've had a blast playing with the kids)!

Instead of having students order integers on a sheet of paper or on a worksheet, just grab a few index cards, think of your students and decide what integers/numbers you want them to order! This is really good for seeing where students are. Positive integers > positive decimals > positive fractions > negative integers > negative decimals > negative fractions. I've found that my students are good until we toss in those nasty decimals and fractions. Practice makes perfect. Eventually they get it, and this is fun for all! 

Concept Constructions....

What's that you say? A CARD???? Yes. It's a card. No, not Magic. No, not Yu-Gi-Oh. These severely underrated (by me) gems went underused by me last year. However, they are great for movement as students can get out of their seats and come up to the board to demonstrate what their particular card has to do with the problem at hand.

Last year, I was the one to use these cards. This year, it will be the kids using these cards. My idea is to creative a positive aura surrounding the cards. That is, if you are selected or given one, it's an honor, or a good thing because you've adhered to school norms and positive behavior. Using these to positively reinforce good behavior isn't too shabby.

This year I'll create a word bank and hope that students can associate and become familiar with particular words that correspond to the current unit. I have also been thinking about a "skills & strategies bank". I'm not completely sure about it yet but the word bank will definitely exist. The following is a visual of what I'm talking about:

"Graph" and "table" are in the middle because they are both mathematical terms that show in up 6.RP (perhaps not so much linear and non-linear graphs, but definitely ratio tables), and they are both "strategies" (well, creating some sort of drawing or representation of the problem at hand is). Not sure if I should just have a word bank or have both...

The Cartesian Coordinate Plane

Last school year I was completely unaware of how important movement and space can be when creating a lesson or setting up a classroom. This time around, I'll look for windows of opportunity where I can have students move and learn at the same time.

I have finally finished creating an actual coordinate plane that the students can use to act out finding/graphing ordered pairs. I learned how to make this from a PD given by some speakers from the New York City Mathematics Project (NYCMP) I attended at the Frederick Douglass Academy in the city. I have been working on this for 3 days. I highly recommend creating this with someone, as creating it alone is quite tedious and takes lots of time.

I used duct tape and a shower curtain. Using simple colors (i.e. black) is also a great idea, as I spent half of the weekend running around to find the same lime green duct tape I used to create the first set of grid lines (after I ran out..). The "squares" are 4.5 x 5 inches. I hope the kids will be excited to use it!