My Classroom is a Hive!

Oh how we talk!  When I was in school, the classroom was quiet.  In fact, the first sign of good teaching was a silent classroom where only the teacher talked. If a question was asked, and you had the answer, raising your hand was the way to go. The only person anyone wanted to share anything with was the teacher.  But, oh have times changed!  Thankfully!

My classroom can be compared to a hive.  All that buzz is the sound of bees working hard.  My room has that productive buzz.  Are there side conversations? Yes, but the same or less than in traditional classrooms.

When students enter the room, they are greeting each other and me. We say the pledge of allegiance and discuss the announcements. The warm up is often similar to the math activity I have discussed frequently called Math Bowling. My teams are working hard together to come up with the equations in a little friendly competition.  Imagine- excitement about mathematics! We learn our new material while choral reading significant notes, discussing content with team members, reading sentence frames aloud while substituting vocabulary and other relevant information.  We think, pair share, and write until the information makes sense enough so we can verbally explain it as well as write it! We celebrate the use of tier 2 vocabulary by hitting the "Easy Button".  The information is shared amongst students and they are no longer looking to the teacher to demonstrate their understanding but rather each other.  Hands do not fly in the air because why tell the teacher the answer when everyone knows she already knows this stuff.  Instead, they are eager to share with their team.  When a student does not understand, they look to their teammates for clarification.  If I should try to intervene, I often hear something like "I will show him Mrs. Taylor."  Wow, my job is now about finding clever ways to present material and then just monitoring the buzz.  But, I am not the queen bee! The students are all the leaders of the hive.  We also talk about what we have learned each day and we talk on Edmodo about our learning and for further clarification.  Rarely, are the posts directed to me for help but for the class.  I love my kids actively learning...I love the buzz!

One step Equations

Many parents are uncomfortable with helping their child do middle school math but the Math Dude at  Math Dude make learning fun. My 6th graders are learning how to isolate the variable via one step equations and this video is very helpful!  There are many cool videos for a variety of Algebra Concepts.

Orders of Operations

This week I began each class with a warm up called Math Bowling and my students shouted "yes!" when they saw it on my promethium board. ( I acquired this game from the Avid summer institute math strand where I also learned a ton of other fun activities.)  this game is based on orders of operations but the kids just think it is a competitive game.  The object is to knock down all the pins...I used 1 through 6 but you could really do as many as you want.  I have large foam dice that we throw or roll to get our numbers.  For example, yesterday we rolled 0, 2, 4, & 5. My students are situated in teams of 4.  Each team then works together to use those four numbers and the operators they know as well as their knowledge of the order of operations to make the numbers add up to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6.  For example,  2+4+(5*0)=6.  The best part is they work so well together to try and be the first team to knock down all the pins.  I award the first 3 teams points but we all enjoy the game and it starts off math class on the right foot!