Mini Milestone!

I am excited to announce that I have hit a mini milestone down at teacherspayteachers! To celebrate, all items in my store are 10% off. Sale will last until Thursday! Go check out some cool stuff!! :-)

TPT Store

So this is the new year...

Not quite, but I love Death Cab for Cutie and always think of this song around New Years. I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! This Christmas break has been a very restful one. In fact, this is the first time I haven't worked on school work in forever. This shall change as it gets closer to school time.

Anywho, I wanted to post a couple things. One thing I wanted to mention were new years resolutions. The past couple years, I didn't make any but I decided to this year. To name a few...

• Cut back on working on school work at home.
• Work out more (I definitely have to stick to this since our school is going to start the biggest loser competition)
• Eat better.
• Blog more.
• Post more products on my TPT store.
• Get a better handle on Math I, Math II, and Science in terms of grading, planning, finding resources, etc...
• Be more organized!

I figured if I had a handful of resolutions, I'm more likely to accomplish at least one, right? I guess we shall see!

Speaking of new products, I recently posted a new product in my TPT store on inequalities. Included in the download are interactive notebook foldables for both one and two step inequalities, word problem templates, examples, and pictures. Here are some pics of my notebook:

Possible Christmas gift?

I've been thinking about purchasing a color laser printer for myself for Christmas. I've been researching online, but there are so many to choose from! Anyone reading this have or have used a color laser printer? If so, what do you recommend? Thanks and HAPPY HOLIDAYS! :-)

Math + M&M's = Happy Students

At the beginning of the school year, (after school had already started AND my team teacher and I had already planned for Geometry), we were informed that our county was going to make the switch from Geometry to Math II effective immediately. Imagine my face when they break this news to us. I spent all. summer. long. prepping for Geometry. WHOMP WHOMP. Needless to say, my team teacher and I have been scrambling to gather as many resources and lesson plan as much as we can just to keep up.

Anywho, fast forward to today and even though it's still tough to get ahead, I think we're in a better place. Right now, we're on exponentials. I found this awesome math lab that models growth and decay and involves CANDY. My students really loved this lab so I thought I'd share some pictures and a link to the lab. Of course, I'm sure they loved the lab because they got the eat the M&M's afterwards, but despite this, they were so engaged and loved seeing them get so excited about math! Is there anyone out there teaching Math II? If so, I'd love some input as to where you get your resources from! Happy Thanksgiving!

NCCTM Conference

This past Thursday and Friday, I was given the opportunity to attend the NCCTM Conference in Greensboro. It was such a great experience! I learned so much within the two days by attending classes that I was interested in.

The most beneficial classes that I attended were the common assessment and analyzing data, how to common core-ize materials, and how to incorporate tasks in classrooms. I also attended two classes on interactive notebooking and stations, but I pretty much knew what was presented. Still great presentations though.

With EVAAS scores (last year's EOG scores) coming in last week and they being as low as they've ever been statewide, it pretty much lit a fire under me. I've experienced so many emotions within a couple days from being upset, to pissed off, to motivated. So having the opportunity to attend the common assessment and analyzing data class really came at a good time. We've always been told to do a common assessment with your team teacher and look at the problems to see what the common missed question was. But we were really not shown how to do it. The ladies at the conference really helped me understand what to do, especially with the data aspect of it.

I loved the common core-rize session because my county does not have the funds to purchase anything! Everything we find, it's from somewhere online or samples we find on the internet. So being taught how to 1) turn textbook questions into common core questions, 2) how to make questions more rigorous and 3) how to incorporate the 8 mathematical practices was a WIN WIN! It is definitely going to take some time for me to get into the hang of changes a lot of things (there is NOT enough time in the day!), but I know it has to get down for the benefit of my kids.

I'm hoping to implement everything that I've learned from this experience and hope to report back good things that are going on in my classroom. And hopefully with this year's test data, my kids can blow that growth out of the water!

New Button!

After googling and researching, I've finally learned how to make my own blog button! Whoo hoo!!

Now I just have to figure out how to link my website back to it!

My View Tonight

My view tonight...creating quadratic matching cards for my Math II block. Whooo!! (Will be on TPT as soon as I find time to put it up there!!)