Made4Math - First Day of School!

Ready or not, it is Monday... that means that kiddos come today! I spent all day on Sunday working on last minute details to prepare for today! I just pray that it goes as well in real life as it does in my head. :) I am also trying to remember to capture a photo every day to document my year, so make sure you visit my #180blog linked above in the header bar.

Anyway, while I worked on a LOT of projects today, several of them were "borrowed" projects, such as the course information guide from @msrubinteach. I'm also borrowing heavily from her first day plans, so if you don't already read her blog, go do it now! She rocks!

So, on to today's projects...

Project #1 - Name Cards

One of the things that I am REALLy bad at is keeping track of student names! It takes me several weeks to learn everyone's names, so this year, I decided to do Name Cards. When they walk in, each group of desks will have 4 pieces of white cardstock and a set of markers. These instructions will be on the board:

I'm really hoping this will help me keep track of kids, plus it's built in formative assessment/exit tickets for the first week! WIN! :)

Project #2 - Seating Chart Cards

It was originally my intention to actually go through my rosters and assign kids to seats. Then time kept slipping away, so that idea got nixed. In the past, I have used a deck of cards for assigning seats, but that requires me to do some explanation. So I created a set of cards that is (hopefully) self explanatory!

Project #3 - Evidence Envelopes

If you have ever talked stats with me, you probably know that my favorite first day of school activity is the story of Kristen Gilbert. I first learned about Ms. Gilbert from the book "The Numbers behind Numb3rs". As soon as I read it, I knew I would be using it in my stat class. Graphs, contingency tables, probability, inference... it had it all! However, after talking to @approx_normal, I liked how she did the 'Evidence Folders' to present the data, so this year my students will have a similar setup as we go through the case.

So what did you make this week? Head on over to the Made4Math blog to see the rest of this week's goodies! Don't forget to submit your post HERE

My Classroom... 2013-14

This has been a weird year so far. Due to some scheduling issues, we had 4 teacher days this week and then kids start on Monday. I have never started school on a Monday in my entire life. Typically, teachers start on Monday and kids on Thursday, until this year. I really hope this isn't a trend that continues in future years because it has been the most stressful start of the year ever! Even with an extra official day, I don't feel ready for kids on Monday and that really freaks me out!

Either way, I took a couple of pictures of my room to share with you guys :)

Walking into my room, here's my door, inspired by @rachelrosales...

From the front of the room, here is the view from my podium...

And finally, the view from my desk...

You may notice that my room looks a lot like it did last year. That's because all of the math classrooms in my building are identical to each other. The only difference is that the math rooms at the end of the hallway have doors that open up into a science classroom for collaboration. I'm sure I'll post pictures of that collaboration during the school year.

I just wish I felt as ready on the inside as my classroom looks! :)

Made4Math - Exit Tickets

Holy moly, where did summer go? Today is my last day of summer and it has been a crazy, busy day! I've done laundry, some cleaning, a lot of last minute school things, and just in general feel very stressed and overwhelmed! I had hoped to get a lot of this done over the past week, but one of my good friends and long-time neighbors has decided to get married.... in two weeks! So I spent my weekend shopping for wedding dresses and bridal party dresses... I'm so NOT a dress person and I thanked my hubby via text many, many times for us eloping! :)

Anyway... on to today's projects!

Project #1 - Exit Tickets
First off, a shout out to @pamjwilson. If you don't follow her, go do it now! Pam blogs at The Radical Rational and almost everytime I read her blog, I find something to pin! Earlier this summer, she blogged about the 2 minute Assessment Grid and mentioned that she was making different posters for each class in their class color so she would have their exit tickets handy at the end of the day. I loved her idea, but was worried about storage of 5 poster boards, so I decided to make my exit slips as quarter sized pieces of paper.

The idea behind the "Type" option is for students to choose one to write about..
Pushpin = an idea they want to remember from the day
Lightbulb = something that "clicked" for them today... a lightbulb moment
Question Mark = a question they still have

Want the file? Get it HERE

Project #2 - The W's Foldable
I like foldables... I like the way they look, the way the kids respond, the cutting and folding that goes into them...

Next week, one of our first lessons is on the "Ws" of the data, the Who, What, When, Where, Why, How, and by Whom that give context to a set of data. Here's the foldable they will be using to take notes :)

Some unrelated notes
A few weeks ago, I posted that server that hosted my blog files had gone belly up. I finally had the time to go through every post and restore most of the links in the older posts. I may have missed one or two, so if that happens, please drop me a line to let me know! Sorry for all of you that have followed links from pinterest and Made4Math hoping to download files, only to find the links were broken.

Also, last week, the rules to Made4Math did change. The original idea to Made4Math was the group accountability of getting things ready for school and to share ideas among the MTBoS. If you look back at my contributions to Made4Math, sometimes I have shared a file, sometimes it's just a photo of my classroom, and that variety is a great thing! I love that we are a community of sharing, because often a comment or a photo sparks an idea. In order to perserve that community of sharing, I did implement a new rule on Made4Math, inspired by one of the rules for the Manic Monday linky at Classroom Freebies. I am asking that if you choose to offer a file to your readers, that you post the actual link on your blog (scribd, box, g-docs, etc) rather than link to a store (such as Teachers Pay Teachers or Teacher's Notebook), even if the file is free in your store. I appreciate all of the support and amazing ideas I have received from the Made4Math/MTBoS community and I want to do all I can to continue that cycle of sharing!

So what did you make this week? Head on over to the Made4Math blog to see the rest of this week's goodies! Don't forget to submit your post HERE

Made4Math - More Classroom Pretties!

Welcome to another wonderful Monday! I can't believe it's August!!! Where the heck did summer go??? And to make it worse, today is the 8th anniversary of my 29-and-holding-on-with-dear-life birthday. As the old country song says... I'm much too young to feel this damn old! :) Anyway, let's move on to happier topics, because I just have to say that my room makes me smile everytime I walk into it! :)

Project #1 - The Hall Pass
While browsing Pinterest one day, I ran across THIS PIN, which linked to the cutest hall pass from The Brown Bag Teacher. She was very awesome and had the hall pass in downloadable format on her blog, but I really wanted to add my name/classroom and the instructions for the students to sign out on the hall pass log. That meant a few changes were in order and I needed to do some searching. I used Colour Lovers for the background and found the awesome frame at MyCuteGraphics. After printing it out and putting it on some purple paper for a color pop, here's my new hallpass:

I'm so pleased with how it turned out! I had some leftover badge holders from #TMC12, so I used those to hold the girls and boys passes, then used ID clips, so the students can clip it onto their shirt and I don't have to worry about where they are laying the pass down when they use the restroom. (EWWW) To make it easy to grab, I used rubber bands (hey, it was all I had available... don't judge!) and they are hanging on black push-pins on my bulletin board. I'm eager to see how this works this year :)

Project #2 - The Table Buckets
If you read the past from last week, I had some helpers on Tuesday that really knocked a lot of things out for me. My students are seated in groups of 4, and last year I used pencil boxes for each group to hold various supplies. I really wasn't a fan of that, so I purchased some buckets at Dollar Tree and got to work on making Table labels...

Again, Colour Lovers for the background and Digs My Hart as the font... Gosh, I really love that font! :)

Of course, the inside of the bucket is pretty special too...

Here you can see the 4 sets of scissors, a set of Green/Yellow/Red cups for group work, and Project #3...

Project #3 - Formative Assessment FlipCards
I have really loved reading Embedded Formative Assessment this summer (twice so far!) and I've always wanted to use clickers in my class, but it just didn't work out. I hated the transition time, the management, etc. So here are my low-tech clickers...


I made them colorful so that I could ask questions based on color (Red if you are stuck, etc), multiple choice (A-E), or on the back, true/false, agree/disagree, or a "?" if kids had questions or no clue where to go from there. Again, this is in Digs My Hart font and I really appreciate my helpers last week laminating, cutting, hole punching, and binder-ringing them together for me!

So what did you make this week? Head on over to the Made4Math blog to see the rest of this week's goodies! Don't forget to submit your post HERE

Projects Galore!

On the way home from school today, I really debated with myself about posting tonight or waiting until next week's Made4Math post. However, I'm just so pumped at how my room is shaping up that I couldn't wait a week to share!

Yesterday, I had a meeting at 3pm and since I live 30 minutes from my school, I decided to go up and work in my room prior to the meeting. I knew I was going to have some student helpers today so I was trying to get things ready for them.

I knew I would have the students (2 girls) for 2 hours, so I was really hoping we could get it all done! Over the weekend, I had spent time getting things printed off and organized so that today would be mostly assembly, and you can see all of the various components on the table above.

Poster Project
This morning I got to school about 30 minutes before the girls arrived, which gave me time to warm up the laminators, etc. When the girls showed up in my room, I quickly put them to work on a traffic light poster (inspired by @pamjwilson) and told them they had creative control. Thankfully one of the girls is as OCD as I am about how things look, so here's the final product:

Group/Table Project
While they had been working on the poster, I was laminating a ton of things, including a new calendar set because when I moved rooms, my "31" of my calendar set went missing! So after the poster was done, it was time to cut, cut, cut, and cut some more! Here's a shot of some of the work the girls did today:

You can see the table signs that I posted on Made4Math, plus my new trash pails for each table, and my new group buckets. I really LOVE the way this all turned out and how classy it looks!

Bulletin Boards Project
While they worked on that, I worked on cutting out the calendar set and getting it all assembled. (Can I just say that I love this set? Thank you Dollar Tree!)

Shoutout here to @pamjwilson -- the black hanging file is where I put absentee work... note the color coding! :)

You can also see the new poster on the big doors. Those doors open to a science classroom on the other side. Second semester, the science teacher and I will be team teaching a Forensic Science class, so that's why we both had to move rooms this summer! I'm not sure what to put on the other door yet, so I'm open to suggestions!

And finally, the last picture is a plea for HELP!!!

I need ideas for that bulletin board over on the left... please please please help me!!! :)

My room isn't totally done, but I'm making progress :)

#Made4Math - Sprucing up the room!

Welcome again to another week of #Made4Math! :) This week, I don't have a ton to share with you because I've been gearing up for having some helpers this week to assist with #Made4Math projects! :)

So as I was browsing pinterest this week, I ran across this eCard and I have to say, it sums up my attitude perfectly!

I am so far behind in curriculum, but I have been working on making my classroom beautiful! :) I can't wait until it's done and I can unveil the finished project. :)

Framing my ideas...
If you know me at all, you know that two of my favorite places are the Target Dollar Spot and Dollar Tree. :) A few weeks ago, hubs and I were in Dollar Tree and found some clear acrylic 5X7 frames. I already have a set of 8x10 frames that I use often for stations, but I snapped up 15 a few of these frames to use in my classroom this year!

The first 8 frames are now my table signs so that students can quickly find their groups on the first day of school!

The adorable chevron frame was borrowed from HERE. However, I zoomed in on the pdf to about size 200%, then used the snipping tool to copy/paste it into Word in order to add a textbook. The font is my current favorite Digs My Hart.

Another frame went to a quote for my desk. Shoutout to Rae, a coworker of hubby, who made this one for my classroom :)

Since my theme this year is black and white, it fit in perfectly! And definitely a quote I need to remember on those "grrrr" days :)

Stay Tuned!
I have lots of great projects in the works for this next week... so excited to share them with you! :)

Teacher Binder 2013-14 Edition

Welcome again to another week of #Made4Math! :) I really thought that I would have several goodies to share with you, but this week's project took longer than I expected. :) However, I'm SO excited about how it turned out and hope you enjoy it too!

** Disclaimer - I have shared the files with you at the end of this post, but when I uploaded it to Google Drive, the font obviously did not come through. I thought of doing it as a pdf, but then it was close to 5meg and you would lose the editability. :( **

Font Credit: The font used below is called Digs My Hart and is my current FAV font! Download it HERE

Background Graphics Credit: The background graphics are from the ColourLovers website. Thanks to @mathtastrophe's post HERE for guiding me through the process!

And of course, thanks to all of my twitter friends that listened to me hem and haw about what I wanted in a binder! :)

Finally.... on to the binder itself!

The Cover...

Honestly, the cover is what started this whole thing! Following @mathtastrophe's instructions, I set out to make just a binder cover (or 20 of them, but who's counting??) :) The back cover looks the same, just doesn't have the text oval in the middle :)

That lead to...

The Dividers...

For my binder, I made three of these... one for the calendar pages, one for my gradebook, and one for meeting notes.

The pages...
I knew I wanted a monthly calendar in there. However, from last year's binder, I knew that if the monthly calendar was in a separate section, I never used it! (P.S. - In the file, you'll see a blank page before the left hand August page. That's where you can copy/paste your district calendar or leave it as a notes page or whatever.)

The thing I really used my notebook for last year was my lesson planning. So I recreated the lesson plan format that I liked, but put it side by side with a weekly agenda. Now I have plenty of room for notes, to-do lists, and more!

In my last divider, I have space for meeting notes. I redid my meetings page from last year to fit a bit better based on a year's worth of work :)

To bind or not to bind?
I have to give kudos to my twitter buddies and my hubby for listening to me as I was so indecisive about how to bind this thing! I really like the look of the coil binding (see my #Made4Math post a few weeks ago), but since I wanted my gradebook in here too, I knew that coil binding would be impractical. Last year I used a Mead FlexBinder, but wasn't really crazy about it, especially as it got thicker towards the end of the year. Traditional binders can be annoying since they don't fold back like a spiral. In the end, I decided just to try binder rings and so far I think I'll like it! I printed the front and back covers on white cardstock before laminating them. The dividers are also laminated, but not on cardstock. The binder rings will allow me to have the notebook similar to a spiral if I wish, but still should be thick enough to provide some stability during those faculty meetings in the auditorium!

The file
If you want a copy of my binder, get it HERE :)
**Note: The file is on google docs, so you will want to go to File:Download to get the PPT file!

Now head on over to the #Made4Math blog to see what others created this week!