Sunday, March 11, 2012

The Pink Panther meets the Purple Panther...

Some of my favorite "colleagues" and the President of our awesome Alma mater.

As we are preparing to take benchmarks next week... YUCK ... I thought that I would develop a PowerPoint to introduce our last math concept.  In order to show the students how to work with algebraic principles and observe constant rates of change, I decided to use a topic about which the students seem to love to pick my brain...

High Point University!!!

So many of my students desire to attend my Alma Mater someday and, I hope that many of them do!  I cannot imagine what my life would have been without HPU, so I thought I'd incorporate it into our math practice for this week.





















Saturday, March 3, 2012

A Seussical Week...

Since it was Dr. Seuss' birthday this past week, we spent the whole week celebrating the imagination of the famous poet!  Well, of course we spent the week discussing his importance during our literacy block, with Guided Reading centers that revolved around "The Lorax"...my personal favorite, but we also spent some time with Ted Geisel during our math time each day this past week!
My Lorax fingernails this week resulted in many of my girls asking me if I could paint their nails too!


Math, ever since student teaching last year, has become my favorite subject to plan...with math..."oh the places you can go..."!  While it took me a great deal of time to create each center, the Dr. Seuss theme was a hit!  With a binder for each station (each binder included activities which cooperative groups could complete together and then write their work on the sheet protected pages with an Expo marker, as well as math practice sheets that they could complete once they had finished the activity in the binder).


The Lorax center seemed to be everyone's favorite because I incorporated data having to do with the actors who have loaned their voices to the new animated Lorax film.  I mean...what fifth grader doesn't get excited when Taylor Swift and Zac Efron (and Betty White was a huge hit too) are the focus of their math center...come on now!!! Hahaha!  While acquiring the data for this center definitely took a great deal of research and time...I'd say that it was "time well spent"!
The following images are the slides that I created and then printed for the Lorax center!
















We ended our Seussical week by going to Ms. Johnson's and Ms. Stewart's first grade classes to read them some Dr. Seuss books.  Both Ms. Johnson and Ms. Stewart are also first-year teachers, and the partnership that we have set up amongst our classes is really great!  The first-graders are planning to come and read to us next time!