MTBoS Challenge Week 1

3 Things I Want To Continue From Last Year

1. Weekly goals for failing students- this will need a bit of modification, since I'll be doing a SBG hybrid, but similar to last year, failing students will be given a slip of paper with their current failing grade and their goal grade (+5%). They have a week to meet this goal or they call home to let their parents know they're failing and will be bringing home a progress report to be signed. The slip with their goal also had a list of 1-5 assignments on which they have an F. I noticed this specific goal, deadline, and means of reacting the goal help students make progress.

2. Interactive Notebooks- my students last year LOVED the organized and predicatable set up, table of contents and flippables in their notebooks. We were constantly referencing their notebooks and looking back to old skills they needed to refresh.

3. Rotations- last year each of my classes were broken up into three groups and they rotated through the activities each day. They were grouped by ability shown on pre-test and the activities were usually spiral review, notes, and teacher time. This allowed me to work with 1/3 of each class at a time, so each student got more one on one attention and I better knew the understanding of each student.

2 New Things I Want To Try This Year

1. Standards Based Grading Hybrid- there are some assignments I still want to bear weight on their grade, so I'm not going completely SBG, but 80% of their grade will be SBG. I'm a little nervous of the workload this will add, and how to explain it to parents/students, but the concept of students/parents/me knowing what skills students need more practice with- not assignments- just seems like common sense.

2. Cornell Notes- this is a notes organization created by AVID that lends itself nicely to review/studying

1 Goal For This Year

1. My highest goal for this year is that 80% of my students meet or exceed their expected growth this year. At the beginning of the year we are given the score students need to get on the end of grade test to have made a year's worth of growth. As of right now I'll have about 85 students, half of which will be identified as gifted in math. I anticipate my biggest struggle actually being with my gifted students; when a student comes to you at the 98th percentile, that doesn't leave a lot of room for growth.

I am trying this year to link up each week with the #MTBoSChallenge. I am new to blogging (and twitter) so we'll see how this goes. 

A Journey Into a Standards Based Grading Hybrid- Part 1

I'm a bit obsessive and have spent way too many hours reading every blog, tweet, research paper, etc. I could about standards based grading. It is summer after all, so I've got spades of time. I want to start by saying I absolutely LOVE the concept of standards based grading (or SBG for short). It makes perfect sense and I'm flabbergasted that I haven't heard anything about it before (I only graduated from my undergrad 3 years ago), and just happen to stumble across it this summer. My first exposure was from this blog, which led me to this blog, which spelled it out in the level of detail I wanted/needed (including posts on how to apply it to different subjects!).
This is one of those times I hate being a 6th grade teacher; since we're at the middle school and 5th grade is at the 4 feeder elementary schools we get minimal information about the students we're to have, and since these kids are being blended into one school for the first time issues could pop up where they didn't exist before. What we have heard is that next year's class is just as lazy as last year's class (and last year's class was VERY lazy) and they're very immature (prone to whining and crying). But even knowing that, I blame my greenness for my ideology that this year my class will run perfectly; every activity will run smoothly, all my students will love me and do all their work, they'll learn everything I teach them, and unicorns will prance around below blue skies and rainbows (that last one was a bit sarcastic, but you get the idea). Throw into the mix that I'll be teaching two AIG (academically intellectually gifted) classes and one regular class this year (I have only ever taught regular classes), and I think I'm going to go with a SBG hybrid model. I'm not comfortable jumping all in from the beginning. Here are my notes on what I've learned from others with a few musings of my own, let me know what you think.

1) Grades for my regular class will be 10% from Clipboard Math (a spiral review activity our students work on every day), 10% from notes (questions answered in eduCanon videos and reflection bookmarks completed once a unit), 80% SBG. Grades for my AIG students will be 7% Clipboard Math, 7% notes, 6% superstar homework (check out this link for the 6th grade series, it's problem-solving/higher-order-thinking practice), 80% SBG.

2) Assessments for SBG will be discussions in class, the final exit ticket for an LT, weekly quizzes, unit tests. Our district gives a "benchmark test" at the end of each quarter, I'm not sure if or how this will factor into their grade.

3) SBG will be on a 0-10 scale I got from here. 10 is advanced (can only be achieved by earning two or more 9's), 8-9 is proficient (wiggle room for little computation errors, missing label, etc.), 6-7 is basic, 0-5 below basic. 1 is they started the problem but didn't get far (underlined correct key words, messed around with the numbers a bit but obviously had no idea what they were doing). 0 is they didn't do anything with the problem.
I'm going with a 10 point scale because my district (and our required grade book system) is based on percentages. If it's a 4 point scale, and 3 means proficient, I don't want that showing up as a 75% in the grade book. Especially since we're on a 7 point grading scale, so 75% is a D. Yikes! Proficient canNOT be a D. My AIG parents would be freaking out, blowing up my email and phone, and stampeding my room for a change.

4) If a student has a 0 on a LT I contact their parents and tutor them during lunch; there's no excuse for getting a 0. This tells me they're either so lost they need immediate intervention, or so lazy they won't even pick up their pencil. And either they need a lot of 1-on-1 support or they need a lesson that actions (or inaction) have consequences, and if they waste my class time I will take their social time to make it up.

5) LT grades will not go down if they don't do as well on a later assessment. This is the part that has made me do the most thinking. I can understand why some people allow their LT grades to go down, it reflects the student's most current understanding of a target. My thoughts on that are first, what if they had a bad day, and that's why they did poorly on the second assessment. Most people would say, "Well, then they practice and see me for a re-assessment." That would add to my number of re-assessments exponentially, it would be more than I could handle, especially my first year at this. Second, if their grade is to show how well they understand a target, and at one point they were proficient, I don't see the benefit of punishing them for forgetting a few things. Honestly, this is 6th grade math, and some of my students don't know where they're going to sleep tonight or where they're going to get their next meal, so in that context what does it matter if they went down 2 or even 5 points on a topic.
I want their grade to show me what they have been able to push their minds to do. I need to have faith that my assessments are truly measuring their level, then I won't have to question that the earlier higher grade was a fluke. My plan, in exchange, is to keep track of their level progression for each LT. So maybe their level for dividing fractions went 5/7/8/7/6. In cases like this where they're showing quite a bit of forgetfulness I'll have a conversation with the student about how well they truly feel they understand the topic and why their score has been slipping. If it's an isolated target I might just give them a practice activity to work through and then we'll discuss it, if it's a pattern and they're truly declining I'll contact parents about what we need to do to provide that student with more support.

6) Homework- except for superstars- will be provided but not required. I will also be giving students the answers to the problems. I want homework to be about practicing skills. If they have the answers they know instantly if they're doing it right or wrong. The next day for the warm up we can discuss any issues they had. While this isn't completely an SBG thing, it's new to me, and I'm worried about it. As I mentioned, my students next year have a history of laziness, and I'm afraid that if it's not graded they won't do it. In the past I have tried making homework optional (now granted, I didn't give them the answers) and practically no one even looked at it, even my best students admitted to it. And I know they'll have a lot of required homework from their other teachers...

So, what do you think about all this? Have I lost my mind?

AVID- preparing the "middle" for college

I have just finished my second year of teaching, and both years have been at the same school. I went to a national conference last week and discovered some things that are normal and run-of-the-mill for me are not for other districts. So, on that basis, I want to talk to you about a program called AVID.
AVID is an acronym (Advancement Via Individual Determination) and the program is dedicated to those students in the middle; the ones who are often overlooked because they're not constantly struggling and not pushing the boundaries of our curriculum. These students are, on average, B or C students who want to go to college but are the first in their family. The AVID program is designed to start in elementary school, teaching students the skills needed (note-taking, organization, prioritization, etc.) to do well in school. In middle school, skills can be taught school-wide, but the focus is on a core group of students (about 20-25 per grade level) who continue working on skills in core classes that will help them progress to college AND they take an AVID elective class that focuses on those skills as well as beginning to look at colleges and what it'll take to get into one. Then in high school students continue with the AVID elective class and they help students prepare for college (applications, tours, interviews, etc.). There is also a piece of the AVID program that continues into higher education, but I don't know anything about it.
This conference I went to last week was an AVID conference. I went with about 40 other people from my school district to the 3-day, 5000-participant, conference in Dallas and it was AMAZING! We spent about half our time working with our site team (the group of people from our school who would be responsible for implementing and evaluating the AVID program at our school), and the other half was spent working on AVID techniques with other teachers from our content area (so I was with 60 other math teachers). The first part I loved about the conference was that they had a Math 1 and a Math 2 strands. So people who did Math 1 last year went to Math 2 this year, so they could take it a step further and not hear the same things they did last year.
At the end of the conference we did an activity in our math strand called Give One, Take One. We took three post-it notes and on each post-it we wrote a different strategy we want to try using in the next school year. We also wrote when we wanted to have tried each strategy by, our name, and our email address. We swapped post-its with three people and are responsible for contacting those people to see how they did with the strategy they gave us. I'm not sure I just did a good job explaining the whole process, but here are the three strategies I hope to implement this year:
1) Sentence Frames- the one thing I LOVED about this strategy was how it will especially help our ELL (English Language Learner) students. The leaders of our session focused on using this strategy with vocabulary. You basically give students a sentence with blanks for missing pieces, but my Ah-Ha! moment was when they said the blanks should be where numbers would go, NOT words. Let's look at an example:
       The _________ of 36 is 6.
       The square root of ____ is ____.
The first sentence frame has a blank where "square root" should be, and the only thing that would fit in that blank is square root; that's a very limited sentence and doesn't lead to individualization. But the second sentence frame could be completed in any number of ways; the student could put 4 and 2, 9 and 3, 225 and 15 or any square (perfect or not) and its square root! Awesome, right?! This idea took sentence frames to a whole new level for me, and I want to use it this year in my class room. My students do Frayer Models for vocabulary, and one of the boxes is Word in a Sentence, and I will use a sentence frame in each Frayer Model. It was on one of my post-it notes, and I think I put October as when I would like to have tried it by; so I'm expecting an email in October asking how sentence frames is going for me.
2) Cornell Notes- If you have not heard of Cornell notes (or c-notes) I HIGHLY suggest you do some research. It's a method of taking notes that pushes students to be more mentally involved, instead of just mindlessly copying the teacher. At the top right students put their name, date and core/period (I won't be doing this part because my students will be using a notebook, but this would be good for classes where notes are taken on loose-sleeve paper and organized in a binder). To the left of that they put the topic and objective (for me this will be the title of the notes and the standard). Below all that they put the "essential question(s)" ( which are the question(s) they should be able to answer after finishing the notes on that page; I am changing the name to "topic question" because our county uses the name "essential question" in another way). Skip down to the bottom of the page, about 4 or 5 lines are blocked off for the summary. Between the essential questions and the summary a vertical line is drawn about 2 to 2 1/2 inches from the left side of the page. To the right of the line is where the students take their notes, however they or their teacher wants. To the left of the line is where they write their Study Questions.
Here is how C-notes work; students start by filling in the top of the page (teacher provides topic, objective and essential questions). Teacher teaches and students take notes in the Notes box. For homework (or within 8 hours of taking the notes) students go back and modify their notes; crossing out what was not needed, adding extra to fill in any holes. Students also, for homework create the Study Questions; it's kind of like Jeopardy, where the notes are the answers and the students create the questions. So if we took notes about finding area of rectangles they would have the steps for finding area followed by a few examples. The Study Question for the steps might be "How do I find the area of a rectangle?". The Study Questions for the examples would be the example problem. The idea is students could cover the right side of their page and use the questions on the left to study and quiz themselves. The next day in class, as a warm-up, students would write the summary for the notes at the bottom of the page. Now students have looked at that one set of notes three times, and they are three times as likely to remember the information. Our session leaders told us about GIST Summaries, where students circle/highlight/underline 3-5 important words/phrases from their notes and use those to write a summary of their notes as well as answer the essential question(s) (I think I would use a GIST Summary for homework the second night, so students will have looked at the material four times :)
I think I said I wanted to have tried this by December (I plan on using the layout beginning day 1, but I'm going to guide students in the Study Question process; begin by giving them the questions, then we develop questions together, then they create questions on their own)

Here is a picture of what the Cornell Notes sheet looks like; I found it by googling "Cornell Notes". There are also sheets where the Notes area is blank, and where the Notes area is graph paper.

3) Tutorials- I'm going to start by showing you the Tutorial Request Form (again, I found this by googling "AVID Tutorial Request Form Sample".

In the AVID elective, students have Tutorials twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays), but I'm going to tell you how I plan to modify the process for my class.

I plan on doing Tutorials as time allows (there are a few days the first quarter where we will have time to review) and the day before each test. Students will fill out this form (or something similar) 2-3 days before; the question they chose should be a higher level question. I love this form because it makes them pick a question they are struggling with, in a topic they don't fully understand, and really break it down to find out exactly where their confusion is. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I ask a student which part they don't understand and they say, "The whole thing," when in fact it is just one step of the process that is tripping them up. So, this form will help them identify where they are having problems. I will look through the submitted forms and break them up into groups based on similar problems. Each group has about 6 or 7 students and a "tutor" (someone with more knowledge of the topic- an 8th grader, high school/college volunteer, or teacher). The student in each group who feels they need the most help will present their problem. (All groups will be working simultaneously, in different parts of the room, so the student presenting doesn't have to feel like everyone is watching them) The presenter will go up the their group's board and will write their original question, as much work as they can do on their own, and write out their POC (point of confusion). While the confused student is presenting, the tutor will be writing their notes for them, so the student presenting can focus on what they're doing on the board but still have a written log of what was done. Now the cool part is the tutor and other students in the group will help clarify the thinking of the presenter, but can ONLY ask questions such as "do we have notes on this?", "what do our notes say to do next?", "is there something that we can eliminate or that is missing?" The non-presenters in each group focus not on the solution to the problem, but on the presenter's thinking. They keep going until the presenter has an answer they are satisfied with. Since all students in the group struggled with the same concept, each student then writes a summary/reflection of their learning from that problem, and- time allowing- share their summary/reflection with the group. 

We watched a video demo of this at our conference (the video was on completing the square) and the whole process- of working through the problem- took about 20 minutes. To our horror, there was an error in the process (the student was doing b^2/2 not (b/2)^2) and the tutor didn't catch it. The leaders of our session informed us that in this situation the teacher should give the group about 5 minutes to catch the mistake, keep asking questions like "are you sure you're doing the steps in the correct order?" or "do you see an error in your process?". If the presenter doesn't catch their mistake the teacher can take 30 seconds to tell the student their process is wrong and quickly tell the student how to fix it (do not take the pen, let the student do all the writing).

This strategy seems extremely powerful, if utilized correctly, so I'll need to do more research on the process before I implement it in class. On my post-it note I said I want to have used this strategy before May, so I'll have plenty of time to fluently understand the process, explain it to my students, and try it in class.

This conference was extremely useful and I learned more strategies than I know what to do with. In my two short years of teaching I have learned to focus my energy on 2-3 new things each year. I know that if I tried to do it all this year it would be overwhelming and nothing would be done well; but if I focus on just a few new things each year I can really work on perfecting them and fitting them to my class.

Exploring New Technology- Delivering Instruction

I am blessed to be at a school that is 1-to-1 (meaning every teacher and student has a laptop). We also allow students to take their laptops home, which is huge for our community (we have about 60% on free/reduced lunch). Along with our laptops our school has been blessed to be the pilot school for a program called URcast, and I was lucky enough to be the lead teacher in implementing this program.
It's a very new program based in Wilmington, NC and basically it is a means of delivering information to students- with or without internet access. We have internet at our school (and that is required for the program) and students simply open the icon on their desktop and it automatically downloads any files the teachers have sent to their classes. After that download, the pdf, docx, mp4, off-line website, etc. is in URcast- and available on the student's laptop- until the teacher-set expiration date, even at home with no internet! Amazing, right?!
I primarily use it to send lesson videos. I run my class in rotations, and students watch the lesson video and copy the notes in the rotation BEFORE they see me. When they get to me we practice the skill they just took notes on. In the video I walk them through the steps for a type of problem (such as comparing with absolute values) and give them a few examples. Then when they get to me I answer any questions they had and we practice the skill.
Another resource I have been playing with a little recently is a website called eduCanon. This allows you to upload YouTube videos and embed them with questions. So I upload my lesson videos to YouTube, then open them in eduCanon and insert questions I want my students to answer along the way. You can create classes on eduCanon and set due dates for each video.
My next goal is to find a way to merge these two awesome programs; I'll keep you updated on that. But even if they can't work together they are both amazing tools I suggest any teacher in a 1-to-1 school check out.
P.S.- I create my videos on my personal iPad, using the Explain Everything app (totally worth the $3.99).
P.P.S.- If you have any questions about URcast PLEASE let me know. I absolutely love the program and love helping it spread to new school districts.

What to do about F's...

One of my biggest problems this year is the number of students who have an F; I feel like my expectations are too low as it is, so I don't want to lower them even further, but at one point 45 out of my 75 students were failing! So here's what I've been doing:

Each Wednesday I give each of my failing students what we call "slips"; they are slips of paper that have the student's name on it along with their current grade and their "goal" (which is 5% above their grade for my gen. ed. students, and 3% above for my students with an IEP). I also list five assignments on the slip that the student currently has an F on and that will help their grade the most if they get a passing grade. I reiterate weekly that they don't have to finish all the assignments to pass, but they are just a list of ideas of some things they can do to meet their goal.

My students with slips have until Tuesday to meet their goal (I picked Wednesday/Tuesday so they have a weekend in there to work on some stuff). If they meet their goal there are no consequences or rewards, but if they DON'T meet their goal they have to take home a progress report to get signed by their parents and bring back the next day. If they don't bring the progress report back signed then they have to call their parents in class and explain that they are failing and didn't get a progress report signed, and that they will need it signed that night.

At first everyone had a goal of 70% (the lowest passing grade), but for the students who had a 10% or 40% it just wasn't realistic of me to expect them  to turn it around so much in one week. I have talked with our EC (special education) teacher, and she said some of our mutual students love getting those slips, because it helps them know exactly what they need to do, but I still have about 20 students each week who don't meet their goal and never care to try. If anyone has any suggestions for changes or ideas of what I can do about my F issue please share!

Survivor: an end-of-the-year review game

Hey look! First day of blogging and already on my second post! I can promise I won't be posting this often once I really get going. The reason I'm posting again so soon is to share with you a game we play at the end of the year to get ready for the EOG. The EOG (End-Of-Grade) tests are given to students every year; each year they take a math test and a language arts test, and in sixth grade they also have to take a science test. These poor kids are tested to death, but what can ya do about it :/
Not much, except try to prepare them, especially for the big ones that "matter". So here is how we do it. I have no idea where the concept for this game came from- for all I know the teacher down the hall created it. If this is wrong and you know where it came from PLEASE let me know so I can give credit.
We have managed to carve out two weeks before the test to play this game; the 7th grade is playing for about 3 or 4 weeks. I think 3 or 4 weeks would be ideal, but we just don't have that kind of time to spare. As a prep, I did research to find what percent of our test will be spent on each strand in our standards. We use Common Core State Standards and in 6th grade have 5 strands (Number Systems, Expressions and Equations, Geometry, Ratios and Proportions, and Statistics and Probability). I used these percentages to find out how many of our days we will devote to each strand in this game; for example, Number Systems is 27-31% of our test, so we are spending 30% of our Survivor days on this strand.
The first day with the students is a prep day. We randomly divide them into groups of 4, and each group is a "Tribe". Each tribe has a file folder and they get some time on the first day to come up with their tribe name and decorate their folder. We also introduce how the game will run and the rules they must follow. After that each day is the same.
Because of our time in class each day has 2 20-minute rounds. During each round the teams work on a worksheet; they all have the same 10 multiple choice questions, and I pulled these questions from SchoolNet (a bank of questions provided by our state). After 20 minutes working on those 10 questions the teacher calls time and all talking must stop (teams lose points if they continue to talk). Now each team has "cards" (full sheets of computer paper) with the letters A, B, C, and D on them. I tell my student I recommend they delegate a card to each tribe member, so Bobby only has to worry about the A card, while Susie covers the B card, and so on. I call out "Question 1" and each tribe holds up the card that matches their answer; so if they answered D for question one, they would hold up the D card. If they hesitate (look at the other tribes to find their answer) they don't get the point, if they hold up more than one card they don't get the point (even if one of the cards is correct). I look around at the cards in the air and give a point to each tribe that answered the question correctly. I do this until we have gone through all the answers. (Some side notes, I split the white boards around my room into sections for each tribe, this is where I keep track of the points, so the tribes can see how they are doing. I also keep track of which questions most tribes got wrong, so we can review those questions). After that we repeat this process for round 2.
After round 2 we see which two tribes had the lowest number of points. Those two tribes each vote someone off (by writing names on paper, so it's anonymous). Once a student has been voted off a tribe, they can't be voted off again until they are in a tribe where everyone has been voted off, so it keeps the kids from being picked on. The two students voted off their tribes "challenge" each other; they race to answer a math question correctly and complete 10 push ups or 15 jumping jacks. The student who "wins" gets to chose which tribe they go to and who-from that new tribe- they are sending back to their old tribe. The old tribe of the student who "loses" gets to chose where that person goes and who they get in return.
The last part of each day is a tribe quiz on the topics covered that day. Each tribe works together on the 10-question quiz, and the tribe with the most points from the two rounds is exempt (and I give them candy). The tribes take the quiz before any members switch tribes.
We repeat that cycle each day: round 1 (20 minutes), round 2 (20 minutes), vote (5 minutes), challenge (10 minutes), quiz (25 minutes). I also keep track of the number of questions each class answers correctly. The classes compete to have the highest percentage, because the highest class gets donuts and a movie one day after testing has finished (and I get the good donuts :) ).
Now, if you have a class (or classes) that you're thinking can't handle this- they can't stay on task, or they fight too much, or whatever reason- I'll have you know I was in the same boat last year. Our students were HORRIBLE; they were disrespectful, easy distracted from their work, had a lot of short fuses, etc.  But this game actually worked. The rounds are short, so they don't have time to lose interest, the teams fluctuate so students who don't get along won't  be stuck with each other long, and students who don't pull their weight our voted off. Keeping track of the class percentage also got them to work together as a class, encouraging other tribes to do well.
I do believe I have covered everything, but if you have any questions just let me know.

A Little About Me

This is my first post in my first blog, and I've been wanting to blog for a while but didn't feel I have much to say that anyone would want to read. I still don't have a lot to add to the world, but today is my last day of spring break and honestly, I'm procrastinating doing the work I need to do. Like if I avoid getting ready for tomorrow, then it won't come and I'll stay on break forever. (Wouldn't it be nice if it worked that way!)
Ok, so here is a little about me. My name is Emily Brown; I grew up in Ohio, went to college in Ohio (Go Rockets!) and then decided I was done with the cold. I'm not a fan of snow- I've seen enough of it to last a lifetime- I like warmth and palm trees. So I decided I would move south, and here I am :) I didn't get the palm trees, but I did get away from the snow, for the most part.
I'm wrapping up my second year down here, and I'm so glad I moved. I'm in a school with more technology than we know what to do with, and surrounded by awesome people I'm blessed enough to call friends. I teach in a rural middle school and let me tell you, there's never a dull moment. Our kids are rough, and some of their home lives make me cry and beyond grateful I grew up how I did, but I feel like I'm really making a difference for some of them. Not as many as I thought I would when I was in college- when every pre-service teacher thinks they're going to change the world- but enough to keep me coming back each day.
In Ohio I was actually certified to teach 7-12 grades, but got down here, North Carolina tacked 6th grade onto my license, and my principal put me in a 6th grade classroom, so here I am. My original plan had been to go to grad school right away. I wanted to be US Secretary of Education (because I figured at the top, no one could tell me "NO!" when I tried to make changes in policy) and change education policies, but I didn't get into grad school (they failed to mention- and I was too naive to know- teaching experience was required for the program). I then went to Plan B: Teach For America. They would find me a job across the county, provide a support system, pay off my loans, and look good on my resume. Needless to say that didn't work out, and I didn't have a Plan C- because I'm an overachiever and have always been fine with just a Plan A- so I spent a semester living at home, reading, and pinning like crazy (Pinterest, for those of you who may not know what it means to "pin").
So I think that's all there is to know about me. On a personal note, I have a cat I adopted in college, his name is Kolby, and he is the softest cat on the face of the earth. It's just the two of us here. The rest of my immediate family is in Ohio but my brother is moving down in August to go to law school at Campbell (congratulations Bubby!).
As I said before, this is my first time blogging, so forgive me (and PLEASE tell me) if I do something wrong, and I'll try to post as often as I can. I plan to focus on my math class; some of the crazy things that happen, the activities we do and just some reflections on how things are going. Our school is 1-to-1, so every student has a laptop; I have a laptop, desktop, SMARTboard, and document camera. I have also bought an iPad I use for different things relating to work. Our classes our 80 minutes this year and I have been doing my best to use/make Interactive Notebooks this year. I tell you this to give you a foundational understanding of what my classroom "looks" like.
And here my first blog post ends. Check back periodically for a window into the Madness in Math Class!