Welcome to 2015! Happy New Year!

I am wishing all of my students, parents, staff, co workers, family and friends a wonderful and blessed new year! I have learned so much in 2014. I grew a lot personally towards the end of the year, I became a far better teacher, and I accomplished one of the biggest goals of my life.

I sincerely hope that 2015 will make us even more refined, give us more than what we started with, and help us grow in all areas of our lives!

I have plenty of things that I want to finish and start this year, but the ones related to teaching are:

A) Starting up my lunch program to help/offer students become more proficient
B) More signs around the room for students to refer to
C) Continue to be consistent
D) More opportunities for students to practice practice practice


1st post of 2015!

The New Wheel of Improvement

Here is a picture of the old Wheel of Improvement:

I tried my best to make the boxes and image a lot more even but ultimately I wasn't able to get it.

After a lesson in using shift to straighten out lines (and being told that I could bring this to life via staples or kinkos) I chose to make a new wheel:

 I can't wait to introduce this to the students to see who is interested and wants to participate. I'll make a post later on what I've been thinking.  

Mario Kart 8 Christmas Tournament Results!

The Christmas tournament concluded on Monday December 22, 2014. I was sick with the flu the entire week prior, so we had to finish it on Monday. We started on Thursday. This all took place during lunch time. Congratulations to the top 4!

Results
1st Place -  N.H.
2nd Place -  J.B.
3rd Place -  O.G.
4th Place -  J.F.           

The Mathematician's Wheel of Improvement

Going back to what I said in an earlier post I have finally finished creating a model of what I want in the classroom for students to be able to see where they are in terms of their improvement.

Something like this isn't bad so long as it's nice and colorful. Students can move their wooden pegs or something stick with their name on it attached to the edges of the board. What I may do is cut each section in half so there are more sections for students to move along. Prizes for each one. This can also be used for different topics, and the further you go along the board, the more difficult the problems of that topic become. I may not use it like that though. Hopefully I can create something in real life that looks like this with the help of the art teacher, as I want to start this program not too long after the beginning of next year.

Congratulations to Class 604!

I wanted to give a special shot-out to class 604 on the blog! Their math skills have been on such a SHARP increase lately! They are experts at Mathematical Practice #1:

Because this class NEVER gives up when given a problem, we have been able to struggle for some time, and learn new math. I am very impressed by their ability to try their hardest and to ask questions. They will become expert mathematicians in no time!!! In addition to coming so far with math, they are also now an ALL gold token class! Congratulations 604, I am proud of you all.

Signed,

Mr. E

Being a Leader

As someone who genuinely wants to be the best (or at least one of the best) math teachers, but at the same time is quite shy, being a leader can be a troublesome thing. I have always ran away from these types of things in the past. "Why don't you lead the ________ team?" "You can be a leader on this whole campus!" "When you talk, everyone turns around and listens to you". I have always turned these types of things down for:

A) Fear of failure
B) High level of responsibility

With teaching, it does not seem like I can escape this anymore. It's like the adage "you can't run from who you are". My classmates have taken somewhat of a liking to my blog, and even some co workers read it. We also have new staff now, and I am starting to think that they are genuinely looking towards me for suggestions, advice, and to watch what I do. In fact, one is coming to observe me for the next few weeks and two have already done so last month. I think I've made it clear that I don't like being the center of attention. But if you are always doing great things, or thinking outside of the box, you are always going to draw attention.

 Classmates and staff expectations of me are now very high and I'm quite nervous about it. As it's only my 2nd year, I am still learning as well. I prefer to just be a valuable resource for them.

Visual Models!

The students and I have been getting tons of mileage out of the visual models lately. We've started Unit 2 this past Monday and we've been doing a great job so far. We have been doing division with fractions. In this unit, I really want to go over any sort of topic or lesson that deals with division. It's imperative, as some of the division with fraction questions (word problems) are known to be extremely troublesome for students without strong conceptual knowledge. However, these visual models can help dig up this conceptual knowledge and help students understand what's going on in the question.

I have been staying far away from algorithms (aside from having them rewrite these division w/ fraction problems as multiplication, as making that relationship explicit is equally important). I think if we can make sense of plenty of many different types of these questions via visual models, we'll do a pretty decent job with this unit. 604 has seriously been stepping up their game, and the models have been a  great tool for them to use when tackling division w/ fraction questions. So far, what a great start to Unit #2!

Percents

For the past week and a half we have been learning about percents in VSC Math. It's been quite challenging passing on the conceptual knowledge. I've given students some of the following questions:

We've used some tape diagram models to solve some of the questions. For some of my students, prior experience with simplifying/reducing is an issue. Some haven't mastered this concept so solving these by making proportions can be troublesome. Also, some of them still struggle with the idea of a proportion or why we would use it. Cross multiplication can be used and some have preferred that (cross multiplying and dividing by the number without a "partner"), along with turning the percent into a decimal and multiplying (if we're looking for the discount). 

We have completed unit 1 and we will start unit 2 next week. It's an ongoing struggle when students are missing foundational skills from prior grades that prevents them from making extreme progress in 6th grade. The next unit encompasses 6.NS standards. I hope that all if not most of the students can really grasp the concept of division before we begin to tackle dividing fractions by fractions, and doing so with word problems.