Today is the last day of summer! I'm definitely not ready for this one to go yet. Typically, I spend a good chunk of my summer outside reading, but we've had a huge heat wave this year, including 100+ degree days in June, which is NOT typical. I think July ended up with over 20 days of triple digit heat, so this has been a summer where I've stayed indoors, shades drawn, and lots of fans & ac!
But whether I'm ready or not, tomorrow morning will come and it will be time to report for my 25th year of teaching. Holy moly, that seems crazy to me! 25 years! What?!?!
Over those 25 years, I've amassed a LOT of stuff. My room has a lot of storage, but not enough - I still have boxes in my garage from when I moved to my new school last year. I had hoped to go through them this summer, but the heat had other plans. :)
This photo is HALF of my Geometry cabinet. Last year I had 4 sections of on-level Geometry and 2 sections of Honors Geometry. This year, I have 2 sections of on-level and 3 of Honors. I really like doing activities as much as I can, so I have a ton of card sorts, files, manipulatives, etc. Here, you can see several of the card based activities on the top shelf and manipulatives on the bottom shelf - Rules, Protractors, Measuring Tapes, Ang Legs, etc. What you don't see is there's also a file crate on the bottom right that holds all of my hanging file activities for Geometry - around the room activities, class sets of Open Middle problems, etc. To be honest, I have more stuff than I know what to do with!
One of my summer goals was to organize everything and make a list of what all I had in the cabinet so that I wouldn't forget to actually USE the various activities I have accumulated over the years.
This task seemed easier said than done... I thought about a list in my lesson planner or in my binder of master copies, but I discarded those ideas because I probably wouldn't LOOK at the list once I made it.
Then, yesterday morning, I had a thought!! (Yeah, those sometimes happen!)
When planning lessons, I tend to use last year's Interactive Notebook (INB) to help me think about what I liked and didn't like about a lesson and jot "notes to my future forgetful self" about what to change. What if I made a list of activities and had it in my INB to refer to while planning? YES! This could work!
So I quickly made a half-sheet template with my units listed at the top and a 2-column paper so I could track the type / location of the resource (file, cards, open middle, Desmos, etc) and the title of the resource. After printing it off, I sat down with my very un-organized list of resources and wrote down each one on the correct unit sheet. The sheets are double-sided so I can add new resources as I find / make them this year and will be easy to move from notebook to notebook as years progress.
It only took me until the weekend before school started to figure out this problem that has been nagging me for a year, but better late than never, right? :)
If you are interested in joining in the #MTBoSBlaugust fun, here's a post with some prompts to help you out! The idea is just to blog / micro-blog during August to help us focus and reflect on the year ahead. Please tag your post on Social Media with the hashtag #MTBoSBlaugust so we can support you in your blogging journey!
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