Skip to main content

Valentine's Day Hop! Five Things I Love About Teaching

Welcome to this stop on our wonderful "Feeling the Love" blog hop!

What do I love about teaching?
1) I truly love helping students to learn! This may seem like a very obvious statement from a teacher, but I'm thinking particularly about those students who may have a little more difficulty understanding a concept and need some extra time to work with me. When we spend that time and that student really "gets" what we've been working on, I can see it in his or her eyes, and I know that they are starting to really understand. Those moments make me so grateful that I have had unlimited opportunities to help children learn over the past 23 years.
2) I love to observe students' "written" thinking. Seeing the way they express their thinking in writing helps me to understand their thought processes. It also helps my brain generate ideas!
3) I love to listen to students' conversations when they are trying to solve problems. It's so interesting to hear the different ways they express their thinking!
4) I love observing the way students can help one another understand concepts!
Click to download
5) I love creating materials that present concepts in different ways. The freebie on this page is a fold it up that I just created to help students understand the way the ladder method can help them find GCF and LCM, and can help them to factor expressions as well! This will be added to our Fold It Up book:)











Thanks for reading and enjoy the blog hop!





Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 9, 2015 at 3:04 PM

    So happy to have a secondary math teacher along our blog hop!
    ~Julie

    ReplyDelete
  2. ConnieFebruary 12, 2015 at 9:55 PM

    I love cross-curriculum activities because they show students that their classes do connect and are not stand alone islands. The fact that your classes combine math and writing is awesome.

    Happy Teaching,
    Connie Casserly
    http://www.teachitwrite.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Memory Wheels - First Day, Last Day, and Any Day in Between!

This post has been moved to:  http://www.cognitivecardiowithmsmm.com/blog/memory-wheels-first-day-last-day-and-any-day-in-between
7 comments
Read more

How Much Math Homework??

I am very curious about math homework in middle school, from a teacher perspective:     How much math homework do you give?     What kind of homework do you give?     How do you go over it in class? Let me explain why I ask these questions. I have taught 6th grade math for eight years, and every year, my goal is to "perfect" the homework issue. My basic issue is that I feel that I spend too much time going over it (not necessarily every day, but often). In the past, we have reviewed homework in the following ways:    1. going over answers as a class    2. self-checking answers that are on the board and sharing any questions    3. partner-checking and then verifying    4. choosing only a few problems to check When I taught elementary school (for 12 years), I never seemed to have this problem....we had 60 minutes for class and I never struggled to fit everything in. But at middle school, we have 44 minutes (minus time to switch for classes), and I just haven't fo
10 comments
Read more

Math Class - First Day Activity

Rectangle of pentominoes Many 6th graders seem to have a pretty negative attitude about math, so I try to do something interesting to "grab" them during our first class. Last year, during the first math class, we spent part of the period working with pentominoes. Before working with the pentominoes, however, we played a name game so we could learn each others' names (I find it impossible to start anything else if I don't know some names, and fortunately, I learn them fairly quickly). rectangle outline For the activity, I divided the students into groups of 3 or 4. The directions for the activity were not complicated - the task was to make a rectangle, using all of the pentominoes. I gave students an outline of the rectangle, as pictured to the left, so they would know the correct size of the rectangle. The squares in the grid are each one inch. The rectangle is 5 squares (inches) wide and 13 inches long (13 inches includes the row that has the "Pent
2 comments
Read more