A Not-So-Typical Day in the Life of Your Average Schoolteacher

     I left this morning to go to school at 6:30 a.m., as usual.  Wagner was left snoozing on the couch, as usual. 

There's a reason my couch is semi-permanently covered with an afghan.

    

     I got home around 5 p.m., as usual.  I went into my kitchen... not so usual.


     There was bird poo all over my stovetop. 


     That's right, bird poo.  On my stove. 

     In my kitchen. 

     Where I cook. 

     And eat.

     After investigating, I realized that a bird had climbed up into my exhaust vent (lifting the flaps outside the house and squeezing inside), and crawled all the way to the kitchen.  He/she/it was stuck between the fan and the screen. 

     I donned my goin' to war outfit (long sleeves, heavy duty winter gloves, sunglasses to protect my eyes...) and began the rescue mission (after going to find the camera to document this momentous occasion, naturally). 

     I took off the vent cover slowly.  Little birdie Foo Foo wasn't too happy about coming out of his little birdie hidey-hole.  Before I could grab him, he took off (and I'm not ashamed to admit that I screamed like a little girl when he flew towards my head) and flew around the kitchen before settling on my window sill.
    

Don't you just LOVE the view from the window over my sink?  Can you see the red barn with the tin roof in the bottom left?

     I finally caught him and let him go outside.  He screeched at me as he flew away, as if it were MY fault he got stuck in my exhaust vent. 

     I don't know how long he had been in there.  I had accidentally knocked the vent cover off a little while ago when I was pressure-washing the siding.  It was put back on within a few days.  Now I feel a little creeped out that he was in there, spying on me.  

    And now I have to go clean up the kitchen. 

     I think I'll order pizza for dinner tonight.



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Yet Another Math Activity

   This week was a short week for us, with Fall Break giving us a four day weekend.  Yay!  In theory, fall break is a time for teachers and students to relax and recharge for the second half of the semester.  In reality, it's a super busy school week, filled with fitting 5 days worth of learning into 3 days of school, finalizing grading period grades, and meeting with parents during pre-report card conferences.  The days off are filled with all my fall yard work {trimming bushes and trees, weeding, mowing, raking leaves, etc.}, catching up on house cleaning and laundry, swapping out summer clothes for winter clothes, and cleaning my refrigerator {something I do fall and spring break--that's right, I'm a party animal!}.

     While I was waiting for some laundry to finish today, I started looking at our upcoming multiplication unit.  I decided to re-vamp the lapbook I made last year and make it cuter.  I didn't add any clip art or anything {I tend to make items that are clip art free as I find it distracting, and I have students who spend their time doodling on the pictures rather than focusing on the lesson}, but I used a cute fonts {hello helvetica and hello journaling from Hello Literacy, one of my favorite blogs!}.

Available at my TpT store.

    I use this lapbook as a way for my munchkins to keep track of their multiplication learning.  We use a folded piece of 12 x 18 construction paper to form the folder and glue the charts on to.  I 3-hole punch it and we put it in their math binder.  They record definitions, strategies, and examples in the lapbook, and they can take it out of their binder to use as a reference as they work or to take home and study.

     Do you use any special incentives or activities to help your students learn multiplication?  I've found that most third graders are excited to begin the multiplication unit because they see it as "big person" math, but once they realize that there is some brainwork involved, they lose interest.  I'd be really interested in hearing some ideas on how you keep your students enthusiastic about learning their facts and strategies.

     

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Long Time No See

Hello again.

It's been a while since I posted anything because the school year seems to have swallowed me whole.  I LOVE this year's crop of munchkins, but it's been a lot of work settling into my new room and getting used to the new routines and procedures of my new school.  Not to mention that the foundation of my house cracked, and I've been dealing with getting estimates and scheduling repairs.

So the foundation dudes are at my house today, which means so am I.  Finally, a personal day so I can catch up on laundry and housecleaning and blogging... and checking in on my house's foundation and the plants they have to dig up to get to the foundation.  I think I got a great company to work on it.  They've been very professional and seem to be doing some good work (like I know what I'm talking about).  I knew I had made the right choice when they broke for lunch a little while ago and they were all sitting out front in their truck eating sandwiches... except for one guy, who unpacked his microwave, plugged it into the generator, and heated up his soup.  I LOVE seeing creativity and ingenuity in action!

Anyway...

I put up a new math activity on Teachers Pay Teachers this morning.  I used it last week with my munchkins as they prepped for their subtraction test.  We'd covered so many skills during our unit that I wanted to give them a chance to practice them all one more time before formally assessing their abilities.

Get it here.

Get it here.

 I had divided the munchkins into 4 groups {no ability grouping here--I wanted my stronger math thinkers to interact with my strugglers so they could model their thinking as they worked}, and we rotated through the stations.  I put subtraction flash cards and math books at each station so early finishers would have something to do while they waited.

The kids loved doing this activity!  They told me that it was WAY better than a worksheet or revisiting activities we'd already done.  They like talking about the math as they work through the problems, and being able to get up and move to the next station helps to keep the wiggles at bay.

I'd love to hear what you do to help your kids review for tests.  Do you do the same thing every time, or mix it up?


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