Classroom Friendly Pencil Sharpener

Hi, guys!

After my first year teaching, I had to bury seven...yes, seven...pencil sharpeners total. One of these was an electric sharpener that just simply gave all it had, one was a traditional, mounted-to-the-wall sharpener that had it's last breath towards the end of the year, and the other five were my trusty hand-held sharpeners that the kids attempted to turn into throwing toys. Needless to say, I was on the hunt for a new sharpener. Fortunately, Classroom Friendly Supplies sent me a lovely pencil sharpener to test out for my readers. Let me just say...I am in love. I am such a lover of all things bright-colored, so this sharpener is right up my alley! There's plenty of options to fit all of your needs as well, although I am partial to this pretty purple :)

Color isn't all this sharpener has going for it. It sharpens effortlessly and is QUIET. For teachers, a quiet sharpener is a blessing in disguise. Gone are the days of being in the middle of talking to your students and getting interrupted by the noises of the sharpener. YAY! You can get them in a deal for 3, so team up with a couple of teacher friends and get you one each. Or, go into it alone and get one for $24.99. Believe me, it is worth every single penny! You can watch this video here to see it in action!

Switching Up the Game

If you know me, then you know just how much I truly enjoy teaching math. Math is something that I love to teach kids to have a passion for and learn to love. It's a subject that is so crucial to students' success in any career yet so disliked by many. While I'm nowhere near perfect at it, I feel confident teaching math. I'm always looking for new and engaging ways to teach kids skills and problem-solving techniques and finding new things and trying them out in the classroom is something I love. However, I just found out that I have the opportunity to come home and teach at a local school. My drive is going from 35 minutes to 5 minutes. The school climate is wonderful and the people are even greater. One notch in the plan--- it's literacy, not math.

At first, I didn't know if I could do it. I didn't know if I was fit for a 5th grade classroom instead of the 7th grade classroom I had spent a year in. It was difficult deciding to leave math behind. It was even tougher imagining leaving a group of kids I have grown to adore. However, I have preached to my students all year long about embracing challenges and learning to love the struggle. Could I really tell my students this if I didn't choose to do the same? Could I be a person of my word and truly practice what I preach if as soon as I got a little nervous and scared I backed out? I don't believe so. The past few days I have grown to felt at ease about this decision. I am so scared, so excited, and so looking forward to the year to come in a completely new 5th grade literacy classroom. I'm leaving behind something great, but what's ahead is exciting, new, and an amazing opportunity I am so lucky to have. I can't wait to spend the summer looking up new activities to teach literacy the best that I possibly can to these kiddos!

Getting Student Feedback: Why?!

As adults, who doesn’t enjoy the chance to share your opinion and give honest feedback to places or people you encounter? Most of us eat that opportunity up. If you don’t believe me, look at Yelp. It was made possible by those of us who want to desperately share feedback. If adults love that chance, then what about kids?

This year, I have made it a point to basically beg each and every student for what they think. At first, I chalked this up to me being a first-year teacher and just needing to know for next year. After a year of it, this is something I will intentionally do every single year.

The biggest motivator in my classroom are my students. If it’s not beneficial for them or they aren’t getting anything out of it, then I don’t want it in my classroom. Is this spoiling them? Not in my eyes. Instead, it’s providing them with the support, guidance, and learning that best suits them. After all, they are the reason why we are there in the first place, so why not ask them what helps them?

After most lessons or experiences in my classroom, I like to have a debriefing session. This doesn’t take much longer than 5-10 minutes of our time and gives me TONS of feedback. I start by asking students to tell me if they liked it or they didn’t. With a quick show of hands, this part is done. Then, I want specifics. I tell them it’s pointless just to tell me they liked it or they didn’t. I want to know the WHY. We will share this aloud and I give any student who doesn’t want to share aloud the chance to write down their opinions if necessary. There will be activities where I’m like oh goodness, never again. They all hated it. They have also told me there are activities that they want to again & these I know to try again the next year!

Tips:

• Make sure they know it’s okay to share their HONEST opinion. I tell them they don’t lose points for disagreeing with me. It’s okay to not like everything.
• Be sure to offer a place to submit it anonymously. Kids can be shy and not want to verbally share.
• Ask them for opinions before doing certain things. This saves wasted class time.
• Ask them how to change a lesson to make it more beneficial for them. They have amazing ideas that need to be shared more!
• Be genuine when asking. Don’t ask for the feedback and never do anything with it. The students pick up on this and can hold a grudge if you never fix anything or try their ideas out.

Treat students with respect, and they will give it back to you on most occasions. Give them the chance to share their views, ideas, opinions, etc. and they will remember that. Feedback is crucial for us as educators and I will for sure be keeping this routine every year.

Relationships are Remedies

If you ask me what the number one thing is in my classroom, I would answer with relationships. I am a huge fan of Twitter and the different educational chats. In a chat the other night, I had a revelation: I don't think I have gone one chat, regardless of the topic, without mentioning relationships. Relationships are everywhere and in everything. Struggling to engage students? Relationships. Struggling to get kids to behave? Relationships. Struggling with anything? Relationships. Basically, the point is clear-- relationships are huge and can make or break your classroom.

Regardless of whether a relationship is there or not, kids are going to do things we may not always want. They are kids and will make mistakes. When they do these things, we want to communicate to them that what they did is not the expectation and provide them ways to fix it. One of my kids in particular has a rough go at home. This can come into school with him. Sometimes, he will do things that are flat out disrespectful and not the appropriate ways of handling situations. Am I tempted to yell and scream and throw things immediately? I'd like to say no, never...but we all have our patience limits. Sometimes we want to do all of those things and more because we can't understand why after the 100th time of having this conversation, here we are again. That's when we have to step back and think to ourselves...Does this kid need us to scream right now? Does this kid need us to tell him how awful he is? Does this kid need us to be one more adult in his life who just sees the bad? Absolutely not. We need to love kids when they are begging us not to. We need to love kids when they make us want to rip our hair out. We need to love them when they are unlovable.

Will a Meteorite Hit Land or Water?

To finish out most of our probability unit, I wanted to do something fun & interactive. What better way to do this then have students toss around an inflatable globe for a few minutes! The goal for the day was to determine how often you could expect a meteorite to hit land versus water. Students tossed the ball and another student would catch it. They would look at their right thumb and record if it was land or water. The groups did this until the ball was tossed 100 times. The kids loved to see how close they could get to the expected value of 70% water and 30% land. We calculated the probabilities and also looked at how likely it was to hit North America by using the areas of the continents. What a great review of Geometry as well!

At the end of the activity, I asked students if they liked it and why. One student said he loved it just because he got to play ball for a few minutes, which was expected. However, some students were saying things like "I never knew I could use Math, Social Studies, and Science all at once!" and "Today was really fun because of the globes but I loved how real-world it was!" I have just started asking students for feedback after activities and I highly recommend it! They are honest and if students can't enjoy or engage in an activity, then why torture them with it?! This helps me know what to keep for next year and what things I could find or create something better for. 

Have you done something like this before in your classroom? I would love to hear about it!

Horse Racing Probability

This week was the start to my seventh graders' probability unit. When I was searching for activities, I knew I needed something EXTRA fun and engaging. Not only is it almost the end of the year, but their poor brains have been tested like crazy lately and they needed a pick-me-up. This horse racing activity was the perfect thing-- especially with the Kentucky Derby so near!

On the first day, we spent the entire class playing the game, making predictions, and collecting our data. Students had to roll a dice twice and find the sum of the numbers. This sum was the winning horse and that horse got to move up a spot. The first horse to reach the finish line was deemed the overall winner of the horse race. Once the students got to that point, they recorded the winner on our class chart. They continued playing until the end of class to get the most data as possible. Students loved playing the game & had fun trying to figure out strategies and I was already hearing which horse they thought was most likely to win. 

On the second day, I wanted to bridge the game and make connections to probability. We started the class by analyzing our class data. I allowed students to tell me what they noticed, wondered, etc. about the graphs. We talked about why #7 happened the most, why #1 wasn't possible, etc. Then, we found the total outcomes and found the probability of each of the 12 horses winning the game. 

Overall, this activity was loads of fun & had so many math connections we were able to make. This is one of those activities I will star and make sure I implement next year somehow! 

Why Relevance Isn't Always the Same as Real-World

Over and over during school, I heard " you want real-world lessons" time and time again. Why? Because students need to directly relate to material to see the value in it and to know the reasoning behind WHY they have to learn what they need to know. While I agree, the problem I have with that as a middle school teacher goes back to growth and development of adolescents. We know that during this time students place a value on themselves. They can be selfish and struggle to see the viewpoints of others or reasonings behind anything other than what's important to them at that very moment (for most-- Snapchat and Instagram are at the top of that list). Keeping that very fact in mind, can a middle-schooler truly see the value in needing to know rates and ratios for comparing laundry detergent costs? Or how much gas it takes to make a round trip from Kentucky to California? Or even the best packaging for popcorn? It's real-world, but is it relevant? My answer is no.

Students want need a teacher who is willing to get to know their interests and what's popular for their students. Relevance is something that can change on a yearly, monthly, weekly, and even daily basis sometimes. Right now my students are all in on the fidget spinner toys roaming around. If I would have connected a lesson to those back in January my kids wouldn't have cared a bit. Did they exist then? Sure. However, they weren't relevant to their lives right at that moment. This goes back to relationships. To know what's relevant with your students, you have to be willing to build relationships with them. Ask questions about what they like. Talk to them about their weekends. It's easy to create relevance once you create relationships. Be willing to build those relationships & the rest becomes easy.