Sunday Scoop and an update on my crazy life...

It has been months since I've been on my poor bloggy! Now that it is summer, I am hoping to be back up here more often. So much has happened since I last posted (which was in March, whoops!)

It's been a crazy past few months! I left my position as an 8th grade math teacher to transition to my new role as my school's Instructional Technology Facilitator. It was really hard to leave my kiddos, especially before the school year was over and the EOGs were near by, but I was confident in leaving my kiddos with my intern from ECU that has been with me all year long. It was tough but it all worked out and my kids showed a ton of growth on their end of grade tests!

My new role as a tech facilitator allows me to work with other teachers at my school and help them with anything they need help with: finding resources, help incorporate technology in their lessons, be in charge of the ipads at school, etc. I love my new job and it's a nice change of pace compared to being in the classroom. I am excited to see how next year will be with me starting in my position at the beginning of the school year as opposed to the end. Another adjustment is that I am now a 12 month employee so I now have to work over the summer. No summer vacay for me!

I've also started back up with grad school. I was already 3 classes in from when I was in grad school a couple of years ago. So I should be graduating next summer with a MaED in Instructional Technology if all goes as planned. Speaking of, I should be doing my last assignment for this last class that's due tomorrow....oops! :-p

Now for Teaching Trio's Sunday Scoop!

Happy Sunday and Happy Father's Day! :-)

Sunday Scoop

I'm linking up with Teaching Trio for this week's Sunday Scoop!

3 Things

• Laundry is always on my Sunday list! There are only two of us - I don't know how we use so many clothes so fast!
• Grocery store shopping...I dread going every week! Even so on Sunday's. Everyone is always shopping for groceries on Sunday's...I'm kicking myself for not going yesterday!
• Lesson Plans - the weather in NC has been absolutely crazy! Seriously, this past Wednesday, the high was 78 degree and that night, we had freezing rain and we ended up having a 2 hr delay the next morning! This crazy weather has been messing with the flow of my lessons so I"m having to re-adjust a little bit.

2 Things

• Spring break is near! Only 2 weeks until Spring break, so I'd like to get the rest of my month planned out if this weather will cooperate!
• Again, because of the weather, we ended up missing about 2 weeks of school last month. Of course, I was anticipating being out all this time and didn't bring anything home! Silly me! Now I'm so behind and progress reports go out Tuesday.

1 Thing

• This makes me sound like a complete nerd, but I love re-organizing my dropbox! I am constantly creating content, updating content, or finding resources, and when I'm in a hurry I just drop it in my box. I like everything to be organized, so I usually re-organize once a month.

Hope everyone has a fantastic week!

Five for Friday

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday!

I love getting ready for working and see Kramer sleeping on the couch. He's so cute! (and spoiled!)

I love my co-workers/friends! We had the opportunity to represent our school at the annual NCTies conference in Raleigh for the past two days! It's a conference that is focused on Technology in the schools. We had an absolute blast! I learned so much from the classes I attended and I'm hoping to make a blog post soon on some of the resources I learned about to share with everyone!

This was one of the best classes I attended at the conference! I learned about so many resources from this presenter/principal named Todd. You should check out his website! It's http://www.the3techninjas.org/. He was so entertaining and had a lot of great ideas!

Yesterday before we headed back home, we decided to eat lunch at this restaurant called "Cow Fish". It's really good! They specialize in burgers, sushi, and burgushi. Yes, burger in sushi. It sounds weird but it was actually pretty good! I'll have to go back another time. Such a nice atmosphere and some of the best sushi I've had!

I've been implementing TenMarks in my class for EOG prep and I needed something to motivate my kids! So I created these classroom coupons to use as incentives. I plan on giving these out to students that score 80% or higher on the CC objective that's assigned to them. When they scan these, it gives them a picture of what they've won. It ranges from HW passes to getting to sit in my rolly chair.

And as a bonus...this made me so excited today!

Richard Byrne from www.freetech4teachers.com started following me on Instagram and left a comment on one of my pictures! I was sitting in one of his classes at the conference and snapped a pic to post on instagram because it was so packed, we had to sit on the floor between the tables!

Thanks for visiting! :)

March Currently!

Two posts in one day! Whoop whoop!!

I'm linking up with Farley for March Currently (I can't believe it's March already!)

Listening
We've been working in our office today (me with lesson planning and he was working on setting up his new website - he makes custom knives!) so we're off to a late start with dinner. He's cooking up some veggie patties with broccoli and brown rice! Yum!

Loving
TenMarks! If you haven't heard of tenmarks, it's a free program online that I am using to prep for end of grade testing. I blogged about how I use it in my classroom here! Check it out!

Thinking
I am SO behind in my curriculum! We have had two weeks of snow!! I don't know how I'm going to get caught up! I usually like to move at a pace that allows me the whole month of May to review, but with all of this snow, it's not going to happen. I'm hoping with implementing tenmarks, I will be able to start my review now throughout the year instead of trying to squeeze it into May.

Wanting
I have a bad habit of starting products for TpT and then never finishing them! I probably have about 10 products just sitting on my desktop. I am hoping that spring break will be the chance I need to get these finished and posted!

Needing
With the snow days, I need to re-adjust everything I have planned. I need to find time to sit down and plan everything, maybe even to the end of the year!

Spring Break Plans
Three words - TpT, Blogging, Netflix. Nuff said!

Thanks for reading and visiting! Hope everyone has a fantastic week! :)

Sunday Scoop

Good Morning! I'm linking up with Teaching Trio for this week's Sunday Scoop!

Hope everyone enjoys their Sunday!! Have a great week! <3

TenMarks for EOG Prep

Have any of you used the online program called TenMarks? I absolutely love it! I am using this program to prepare my kids for the end of grade tests at the end of the year.

TenMarks is a free math program that has a library of common core standards by grade. You can go in and assign standards to your classes or by student to complete practice problems. When students work on their assignments, it provides hints and videos that they can use to help them through a problem. I really like the questions that the program provides for each standard because it's not all multiple choice - some are fill in the blank and some also have checkboxes for questions that have more than one answer.

This is what the teacher dashboard looks like.

This is what is looks like when you click on a specific assignment you've assigned your class.

Based off of this, I know I need to go back over irrational numbers!

This is what it looks like when you click on the assignment. It gives you the status of each student in your class. When you click on their score, it will show you the questions they had and which questions they got correct, partially correct, and incorrect. It shows you what they put as their answer and what the correct answer should have been. It also tells you if they've used the hints and videos, as well as how much time they've spent on an assignment. I had one student make a 10% and he spent literally 1 minute on the assignment. I made him go back and do it again!

This is what it looks like when you go to the curriculum tab to assign your class an assignment.

As you can see, you can choose which standard you want to assign to them. You can also pull up to 3 standards from other grades (using the free version).

By far, my most favorite part of the program - THE DATA! Look at this! This first picture is the performance by class at a glance.

And this picture is the performance by CC standard! When you click on the colored dots, it tells you which individual student falls in that category!

When students complete an assignment, data gets sent back to the teacher. When you look at each individual student, you can see their "report card", which lists every score they've made for every assignment assigned. When you're looking at the class, it gives you the class average, average amount of time spent, and the most common mistakes your class made. I especially love that because the program will automatically detect deficiencies am able to go back and re-teach what they mostly missed.

What I am doing in my class is assigning two standards a week - 10 questions each. 1 standard is focused on a topic we covered in a previous nine weeks as a review. The other standard is on a topic we are covering at the moment. They are assigned these assignments on Monday and they have until that Friday to complete them. For students that score lower than a 60%, I will have them go back and re-do the problems they missed. They will be required to provide a correct solution (which the program gives them already) and an explanation as to how to get to the correct solution.

I am also planning on having a reinforcement plan for students that score above 80%. My principal is really pushing proficiency above 80%. It's still a thought in process, but I am thinking of maybe putting the names of students that have score 80% or higher on a TenMark assignment into a box by blocks and drawing two names a week to win a HW pass. But then I am also thinking I want to do something for all kids that score higher than 80%. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Because we always seem to run out of time towards the end of the year (and the fact that we've been out for 7 days because of snow), I think this will be a great way to have my kids constantly reviewing these common core standards to prepare for the EOG. I am hoping to make a future blog post on their progress (This is my 2nd week implementing, but we've been out for a week due to snow). I am positive that this will be beneficial!!

The program is free! To sign up and check it out, click here!

Sunday Scoop

I'm linking up with Teaching Trio for this week's Sunday Scoop!

3 Things I have to do
Last Monday, we left school early because of hazardous weather that was coming our way (I live in Eastern NC, we normally don't get much winter weather down here!) I was not expecting to miss the rest of the week! You would think that since I was home all week long that I would have the laundry done and lessons done for the week but I was just sooooo lazy! And it felt great to just once take a breather, relax, and do what I wanted to do! Now it's kicking me in the behind because I'm having to do these all at the last minute, but it was completely worth it! :)
As for wrapping my head around this upcoming week, they're calling for snow midday tomorrow and snow on Thursday, so it will be a wonky week. This should be fun!

2 Things I hope to do
I have about 10 products that I've started and just never gotten around to finish! I really need to get this up and running since it's been awhile since I posted something new on my page. I also want to work on another freebie for my followers since March is just around the corner!
I did take some time during this weekend to start prepping for my next unit, which is on system of equations. I need to find some time to sit down and finish everything at once so I will be planned ahead of time!

1 Thing I'm happy to do
Sims 4. Oh my word...not sure how many of you play but I've been playing Sims since I was in middle school and Sims 1 first came out. I own every single Sims game and expansion pack. Last Tuesday, Sims 4 finally came out on Mac and I've been playing every day like a mad woman. This is the reason why I haven't gotten anything school related done!

Until next time! <3

Math Madness Monday

I'm linking up with Diana for Math Madness Monday!

At my school, we are very data driven. We give common assessments every 4 1/2 weeks and benchmark assessments every nine weeks. After our entire school finishes their common assessments, we analyze their data and input their scores into a spreadsheet where we have set goals for them based off of their EVAAS scores. We then make new goals for the next assessment. This gives us an idea of how much our students have grown (or not) since the last assessments and based off of this, allows us to create re-teaching plans to make sure we hit on standards that our students scored the weakest on.

One thing I like to do is have my kids analyze their classes data. How do I do this? I print out the top 5-7 most missed problems from their assessments and break the kids up into groups. I assign each group a problem and give each group their problem's most picked answer by their peers. They then have to work through the problem together and come up to the class to present. We do this after every assessment. I love this activity because my kids are working together, I'm maximizing classroom time by focusing on standards that the kids missed the most on, and the kids love teaching their peers! :-)

I finally got a chance to type up a reflection sheet so I didn't have to keep writing the same questions on the board for the kids to answer. Soooo...

Here is a freebie for you! I hope that someone finds this useful in their own classroom. In addition to the reflection sheet I use, I have also included a "problem of the day" template with it. You can download it here!

Thanks so much for stopping by! :-)

Currently February

I'm linking up with Farley for this month's currently linky. Wow, I haven't done this since LAST YEAR!

Listening: to absolutely nothing. I love it. J is still sleeping and Kramer is outside running around. Feel nice to have nothing going on right now.

Loving: Even though it's Sunday aka Laundry day, it's still the weekend. I was out of town all day yesterday, so it feels nice to know I have at least one day to relax and lay around.

Thinking: I've been so busy at school with everything going on, I've gotten so behind on posting new products in my store. I have so many ideas and I have started new products but never seem to have time to finish them. And my poor blog....thank goodness for linky parties!

Wanting: Since our curriculum facilitator left, all of the department chairs at our school pretty much were given her responsibilities while we find a replacement. It's been so stressful to take care of administrative duties on top of having to prepare weekly lessons and teach. I've been keeping up with everything our principal expects us to do, but I do need a mental health day before I get burnt out.

Needing: One of my best friend's from college found out her fiance needed emergency surgery. We need all of the prayers and good vibes we can get. Me and my other best friend from college drove out to Wilmington (about 2 hours away) to surprise her and give her support. We took her out to lunch yesterday and I'm glad that we were able to spend time with her, even if it was only for a little while.

Pageant Title: Miss Workaholic would be best fitting for me because I am ALWAYS working. Don't get me wrong - I love my job and I love helping others, and deep down inside, I kind of enjoy being a workaholic because it keeps me busy., Butttt I do enjoy my days where I don't have anything to do and can enjoy the silence. Everyone needs one of those days.

Happy Saturday! Five for Friday link up and a freebie!

I have so much to share, so let's get started! I'm linking up with doodlebugs for Five for Friday linky (even though I'm definitely a day late!)

Selfies before a staff meeting! Wednesday was our first staff meeting without our Curriculum Facilitator. 

Break for story time - We've had our CF at my school for about 3 years and within those years, she has really made an impact on our school. Our school is more data driven and motivated than ever because of her hard work. On days when teachers would be so stressed and feel overwhelmed, her sense of humor and personality would bring our spirits up. I know that even though she's in a different county now, we'll still continue to stay in contact even though I won't see her every day anymore!

OK, now that you know what happened, me and my fellow awesome science teacher Mrs. Carlos texted her our sad faces since she's not with us anymore. I'm sure there will be more of these sad face selfies to come!! :-)

My boys! <3 I love them! Johnathan was helping me with something and Kramer jumped on the couch and positioned himself like this without any help. It was too cute. I HAD to take a picture! The only thing missing from this picture are Kramer's nerd glasses! :-)

I decided to try a different seating arrangement for this nine weeks. Usually I have my tables sitting in groups, but I wanted something new. This arrangement reminds me of a college classroom. Two tables are pushed together so there are 4 students in each row. Because of this arrangement, I was also able to fit a table for my student intern. My student intern is AWESOME! This Monday will be her first time taking over one of my math classes every day, so I am pretty excited to see how well she adapts. I am excited for her future!

All the math teachers at my school will be given to go to a professional development class focused on math. It's 5 classes from now to the end of the year. I'm excited because I am always looks for new strategies and new ideas to implement in my math class, but then again I'm a little blah about it because I don't want to miss school days, especially around EOG time. Part of the requirements for the class is to read articles that are provided and be prepared to discuss at the class. I feel like I'm in college all over again! Since my kids were benchmark testing last week, I took the time to get ahead and read the article to prepare. The articles they provided are pretty interesting (I bet you could tell from that picture, I was overly excited). I'm looking forward to our first class!

Since it's been a while since I've blogged, I decided to make a freebie for all of you! Perfect for those of you who are teaching slope right now and the fact that the month of February is approaching! You can download this freebie by clicking HERE! Hope you enjoy and please feel free to share and leave feedback! :-)