In my last post, I mentioned the importance of being prepared. For me, the best possible way to do this is to use a planner. All year, I had been using a provided planner from the school. The problem was that it was only a monthly view and I was finding that it would get extremely cluttered and ultimately impossible to read. I decided to take the plunge into a new planner and after some research, I purchased the 365 Happy Planner kit. I am in love OBSESSED with this planner. It's cute and I've found myself feeling so much more organized and as a bonus it makes planning fun because you can turn it into a scrapbook. Or don't....that's your choice, which is the best part!

   

 Along with the planner, I wanted a more cost-effective way to get stickers. I bought the Xyron 1.5 inch Sticker Maker to go along with it and I've never been so excited by an $8 toy. In the image below, every single sticker you see is homemade from a free printable I found with a quick search. All you do is print your image and quickly roll it through the sticker maker, peel off the backing, and your good to go. It's the perfect accompaniment to the planner and you could use it for so many
things outside of your planning life.

 

Oreo Stacking Box-and-Whiskers

As a day-before-Spring Break activity, my math classes all did the Oreo Stacking activity, which I found here. Oh my goodness...this was one of the best activities we have done all year. Student buy-in was there, engagement was at an all-time high, AND they got to eat Oreos! The focus of this activity is on mean, median, and mode. When we got back from break, I wanted to find a way to extend this so we could use their data we had already found. I decided to have my students create box-and-whiskers based off the entire classes' data.  For their posters, I wanted them to make sure they had their data listed, the box-and-whisker plot created and labelled, and lastly, I wanted them to analyze their box-and-whisker plot to determine what it truly means in the sense of the Oreos. This was a knock-out project & I encourage you all to try the Oreo activity if you haven't already!

Once again, the Oreos weren't even there, but engagement was still extremely high because this data meant something to the students. This is so important and as I have progressed throughout the year I have realized just HOW important relevance really is in a classroom. Their math work turned out amazing & the posters they created look fantastic.

Do you want to do work you see no ownership or value in? Probably not. And even for the self-motivated, it's likely not going to be your best work. How can I create unrealistic situations for students that aren't important for them and still expect them to perform at the top? I've decided I can't. Let's stop giving students useless tasks and start creating experiences.