The Bow Tie Teacher

Blog abandonment

This week was so draining. I don't want to drone on and on about how this week was a BEAST. You don't want to hear that. 

What I will say is this, no question this week built my faith. I have been working on building margin in my life. Even with this week beating me up I didn't get to my limits.  I know this week coming, I'm going to be pushed more than last week. Thankfully, I've already planned for it and I feel grace to do it. I can see that consistent on going improvement will yield huge results. 

To give balance I've found it really tough to plan/think LONG term about my lessons and class learning. I talked about in in my Avengers post aout making the lessons catchy to get the kids excited about the next lesson. I've had some success in my re-growing veggies lessons in science, but not so much in my other lessons. Just need to work on this for sure. 

I have an evaluation this week and I feel good about it. I picked up some great skills at a workshop a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully, I've been kicking it hard so Monday will be the best teaching anyone has seen cause I've been doling out the best daily. 

Crossfit this week was strong. I didn't make it to Crossfit South Cobb everyday, but I was able to sneak into Basement Crossfit and keep my goals in line. I've been juicing well. It's not hard now at all. I'm down nearly 13 pounds. I hope to be able to plant our garden next week or the following week. 

Let's get at it. 

A pretty fun lesson

I told you before that I'm working on keeping my lessons sticky. I want to see how I can tie one lesson to the next and keep bringing up old lessons and fore shadowing future lessons. So we'll be using our graphs from this week to talk about base ten and the such. We'll pull out graphs again when we start skip counting by 2's and 5's. I introduced the idea when we made pictographs this week by using 1 picture to represent 2 votes on a project. Ok, here we go. 

Been teaching graphs to the BEST 2nd grade class in the world this week. Been a lot of fun. We also did tally marks. We had a great idea to survey the school. So each group picked a topic and went to survey. Some counted the different color bulletin boards. Another counted the Teachers and Students we saw in the hall during our 10 minute tour. We had a lot of different surveys. 

So this group is counting the number of 1st grade boys and girls that came from the the Cafe. They're legit for sure. 

Here are their results. Pretty good job. Soon we'll have to use our new found survey skills if we want to partake in school wide academic fair. So hopefully by then my entire class will be truly legit surveyors. Might have them do these throughout the year as centers or something. 

It's tempting to do some surveying about the up coming Presidential race since in SS we're talking about the roles of President/Govenor and Mayor. 

If someone could help me come up with ways to help my students improve the quality of their work, I'd appreciate the hints. Right now they're busy trying to hurry and not to turn in a quality product. Takes a lot of effort and modeling to get even a descent product from them sometimes. I know they can do better. After much probing and proding I get some nice work. Begging for ideas. 

A lesson learned from the Avengers

If you haven't seen the Avengers movie I can only tell you that you're missing a phenominal movie. Well acted, well developed and well...Hulk is in it. Anyway. 

There are some great points in the movie, but this is an education blog so you're reading to see "how in the world he's going to make this connection." Here I go. 

Every movie, Hulk, Thor, Captain America and both Iron Man films had a point where another movie was tied in. It could be a brief glimpse in the background, Tony Stark's dad, or the ever present Nick Fury to bring his one eye perspective to the situation. No matter what every movie told you simply this "stay tuned there's going to be a big tie in eventually." That tie in was the Avengers. 

The latest from Marvel brought so many ideas and concepts together that it had no choice, but be a HUGE fail or a fantastic well though tout tie in. Thankfully it was the latter. 

I can't tell you how many times have I written a lesson to teach my students a concept. It met it's goal, but it never left them feeling as if something even bigger was going to happen soon? To often I sadly admit I didn't build excitement by telling one story, but leaving  a tidbit of another and another and another. Then even after you've given a great lesson, the kids are excited about what they learned you drop them another nugget to build anticipation for the next. 

*When I started reading comic books, Thanos the Mad Titan was the first villain I met. I can not begin to tell you how off the chain seeing him battle the Avengers will be. Now if I could get my students this amped up about 2 digit multiplication. Oh to dream.