Tackling the Classroom

I've been working summer school all July long, so this past Monday was the first time I could actually go to school to work on my classroom. On Monday, I did more dusting and cleaning than anything. I forget how dirty everything gets when a room is unoccupied for so long. Not only was it so dusty, but apparently every spider at my school has decided to make my classroom home. Ughhh! Needless to say, I left my classroom Monday afternoon messier than it was before I got there!

Tuesday I wasn't able to work on my classroom because I had mentor training with NCDPI. When I was a first year teacher, my county assigned retired teachers to new teachers as their mentors for their first three years of teaching. Because of funds, they unfortunately cut this program. I was already a fourth year teacher, so I was lucky to have my three years with my mentor. But I can't imagine being a new teacher and not having a mentor there to help! I learned so much from my own mentor that has made me a better teacher! Thankfully, our county is now revamping the mentor program by assigning veteran teachers to new teachers within the school building. I get to meet my two mentees next week at a luncheon my school is hosting! I'm excited to be working with these new teachers!

Today, I was able to go back to school and work on my classroom again. I was able to do more than clean this time! I set up my tables and chairs (Every class I have will be over 30 this year because my hall will be a four person team). Because I have to accomodate so many kids, I have no room for anything! I had to resort to placing my student computers on my cabinets, next to the faucets (I'm sure I'm going to be told to move them).

My big mess!

This was a shelf that was left behind by a previous teacher. It was plain white and dirty from wear and tear. I spruced it up with some polka dot wrapping paper, then outlined the edges with bright green washi tape!

This is the bulletin board at the front of my room. Previous years, I have used this wall for school news, calendar, important info, and keeping up with absences. Because I really want to focus on vocab this year, I turned this into my words worth knowing board. Those sentences strips are laminated, so I can write and wipe whenever I need too. I made vocab cards for each section on powerpoint, but I figured I would be more likely to change out the words or add to the list if I wrote them with an expo instead! The words on this bulletin board will be the words we focus on in a unit and my kiddos will be required to use our WWK ISN template, which you can download for free here.

Here is the left side of my whiteboard where I section off for EQ's, standards, and lesson for each of my classes. It feels GREAT that I only have two preps this year!!!! 

Here is my unfinished data wall. I decided since my word wall is now my front bulletin board, I'm going to use my entire back wall for data purposes. I'm still thinking about how I'm going to implement this data wall. I THINK what I'm going to do is have this display pre/post assessment averages for each standard. I have two sections of 8th grade math and two sections of Foundations of Math II, so I think I'm going to have different color bars to represent each class and make it into a competition. I'm also planning on finding a way to show my class goals so my kids can see if they class has met the goal that I have set for them.

I've been looking around for examples of other data walls, but I find so many elementary walls. I'm teaching math to the entire 8th grade and it would be overwhelming to have every single student represented on the wall, which is why I decided to use it for class averages. For individual data tracking, I'm going to continue to use my data trackers from last year, which you can find in my tpt store. My kids enjoy coloring in their graphs and seeing how much they've grown. Plus, each of their goals are individualized based off of EVAAS, so a lot of them like to keep their goals private. I have math I trackers, 8th grade trackers, 7th grade trackers, and 6th grade trackers available in my tpt store! 

That's all for now! Until next time! :-)

August Currently...

I'm linking up with Farley for this month's currently!

Listening - It's been raining all. day. long. but at least it's cooling down outside. I'm just hoping that it doesn't get any more humid - for my hair's sake!

Loving - As previously posted, boyfriend purchased a color laser printer and I've seriously gone printer crazy. I'm creating letters and posters and magnets galore. At least the excitement is motivating me to get stuff done for the school year! ;-)

Thinking - I've been working summer school for the entire month of July, so I haven't been able to get as much done as I would have liked. We have make ups next week, but I have mentor training one day next week, then I'm helping with our new teacher orientation the week after. This summer has definitely flown by!

Wanting - I've been stalking the weekly ads trying to find good deals. I usually keep my eye out for glue sticks, pencils, twisty papermate pencils (my fave), and expo markers. I've stocked up on glue sticks and expo markers last week, but of course I can never have enough! My teacher friends and I are taking a trip to Raleigh one Saturday to celebrate a birthday and hit up all of the teacher shops! I can't wait!

Needing - Again, because of summer school, I haven't been able to do much of anything. Because of the workshop I have to attend and helping out at the new teacher orientation, I'll only have 4 days total to clean, move desks, and decorate before school starts on the 18th!

What about you guys? What supplies do you keep any eye out for or stock up on during this time?!

Secondary Giveaway!!

There is a secondary giveaway happening at The Language Arts Classroom! There is something for everyone! Visit their Blog and check it out!! Contest ends on August 9th! If you teach Math I, Math II, and/or Math III, you have a chance to win my common core standards poster pack!! A $7/150 + page item for FREE!

100 follower giveaway results!

Good Morning! Thanks to everyone that submitted entries for my 100 follower giveaway!! Because I was TWO (yay!) likes away from 100 on my FB page, I decided to pick TWO winners!!! And the winners are...

Yay! Congrats to you both! Please check your email! :-)

Next goal - 200 followers! I can't wait for the next giveaway! :-)

100 followers on TPT = Giveaway!!

I have finally reached 100 followers at my tpt store! Yay! And to celebrate, I am holding a giveaway raffle! Winner get to pick anything they would love to have from my store!! You have until August 1st to enter!

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Also, Diane from One Teacher's Adventure is having an awesome giveaway that I am participating in. That means TWO opportunities to pick whatever you would like from my tpt store! Visit her blog here to enter in her giveaway!!!

Monday Made it!

Good Morning!! I'm linking up with 4th Grade Frolics for another Monday Made it linky party! Linking up every Monday definitely makes my Monday's so much better!

I have been wanting a color laser printer FOR.EV.ER. I even blogged about it a couple of months ago. It made me so jealous to read other blogs and see all of their colorful posters. task cards, etc. that they made and printed out for their classroom. After months and months of talking about it, drooling over it, and weighing pros and cons, I decided that I would check out the back to school sales to see if there were any good deals. Staples had a really good deal on an HP colorjet printer. It was originally $429 and was marked down to $299. Even though this was such a good deal, $299 was soooo much money for me to spend.

This is where my super amazingly awesome boyfriend comes in! I guess I must have been talking about it A LOT at home - Johnathan said that he would buy it for me as my early Christmas present! Ahhhhh! <3 So we drove to staples, picked it up and got an even better deal with the 15% coupon they gave us, and brought it home to set it up. I've been printing and printing all day long. Having it at home is even better than I imagined! The color is so crisp and it's great that I can print from my iPad and my MacBook Pro wirelessly. Best. present. ever.

Here she is!

I had to snapchat everyone my excitement!

Now that I had this awesome printer, I HAD to create something to print and laminate! I bought some $1 bins from the Target dollar spot and just dressed it up with some ribbon. I needed cute chevron labels to organize my classroom better.

I then bought some velcro stickies from Hobby Lobby so that I could change the labels on my bins whenever I needed to.

And voila! Interchangeable labels for my classroom!

Lastly, I made these posters a while back, but never had the chance to print them out. Last year, I found that my kids gave up too easily when working on an assignment or a task. I would literally just finish giving directions and not even a minute later, I had kids raising their hand to ask for assistance. I want my students to be able to think critically. I want them to become independent and I want for them to be able to work through a problem by trying every single strategy before needing my assistance. My kids hate when I answer their questions with questions, but I always remind them that I do this for them. They won't have my assistance on the test.

That being said, I created these posters to help my kids become more independent. About 98% of the time, questions some of my kids had would have been answered if they would have looked in their interactive notebooks. So when I teach these procedures at the beginning of the school year, I will make sure to emphasize that they need to have their interactive notebooks out to the correct lesson by the time they need to ask for my assistance. Same goes for the problem solving template that I will give them. I want to visually see that they have tried everything they could to complete their assignment.

Until next time! :-)

Five for Friday Linky!

Happy Friday! I am linking up with Doodle Bugs for another Five for Friday!

Last weekend, I finally decided to create a Facebook page for The Math Nerdette! I've been reading a lot of blog post reflecting on what fellow bloggers learned from their Vegas trip to the TPT conference (totally jealous - wish i could have gone!). One of the repeating pieces of advice I kept reading is how important social media is. I have a blog and I have a TPT store. My TPT store has less than 100 followers and sometimes I feel like no one is reading this blog! So I decided to create a FB page AND become involved with the TPT seller's forum. WHOA! My stats have already gone up so much within the past week! My TPT store followers have gone up by 12!! (This makes me super excited because I was stuck at 69 FOR.EV.ER. and was a little disappointed when I noticed it go down by one). My FB page is almost at 100 likes (and there will be an awesome giveaway/freebie/something special when that happens), and my bloggy numbers have increased as well. I have also learned how to do these so called "pinning parties". I was so intimidated because I'm such a newbie, and seriously, all I had to do was open a thread and read the directions! Super easy to get your products out there via pinterest! For July to be a slow month, I noticed a small bump in sales for me. I share this with you because for other bloggers and TPT sellers who become discouraged (just like me), there is always more that you can do to promote your products! And it does make such a difference with getting your name out there on the forums! 

I've been working a lot on trying to get next year planned (or at least outlined). Last year, I taught 8th grade science, Math I, and Math II. This year, I'm teaching 8th grade math and Foundations of Math II. Two completely new curriculums - not to mention that I will also be the only math teacher on our hall next year. A fellow blogger (I wish I could remember who, I'm sorry I couldn't give you credit!) posted about this AH-MA-ZING website for common core planning called commoncurriculum.com. It's SUCH a great tool to use - not only do you have electronic lesson plans to share with your co-teachers and admin, but it has a section where you can have a year-long plan (just like the districts). If you haven't heard of it or haven't really played around with you, I suggest doing so! It has made planning for next year so much easier.

For each unit, you can easily add your lessons and within the lesson, can add standards, essential questions, and anything else you decide you need by just clicking "add section". It forces me to be super organized and easier for me to know what I'll need to print out or post to Edmodo by just looking at the files I attached for that lesson!

Many students at my school (or just in general) struggle with math vocabulary. Last year, our math department had a discussion on what we could do to expose our students to more vocabulary AND having them understand what we teach and speak "math". Last year, I did frayer models, but they took up too much paper every time we had a unit to do and three other teachers were doing frayers models as well. They were frayered out! What I decided to do next year is make a words worth knowing glossary in the back of their interactive notebooks. My plan is to have my students paste about 4-5 of this template in the back of their ISN like a glossary. Every time we introduce a new vocabulary word or come across a vocab word they don't know, we'll write it in our WWK template. The template has a space for the word, definition, example, and notes. This way, the kids will have a place to refer back to in their ISN's when they come across a word they forgot. I also plan on writing new WWK vocab on little sentence strips I bought from Michaels. They are colorful and bright, so they pop out at you. I laminated (I LOVE MY LAMINATOR!!)them so I can write a word with an Expo marker and wipe off when done.

You can download this FREEBIE template by clicking here!

As mentioned before, I've been working on my interactive notebook for next year. I've created some new templates and practices as I move along to the next lesson. They aren't up for sale yet since I want to write the answers in my notebook first to take pics of and include that in the sale. Here's a sneak peek of a few pages I'm working on...

Whew!! Number 5!! Lastly, on a trip to Target, I found these $1 letter trays that I could use next year! I snagged the last three black trays! They were a little blah looking, so I played around with my ribbon stash and voila! It's still not as cutsy as I would like, but it's a start. I'm thinking of making a label to go in the front.

This was a long, but fun post! Until next time! :-)