My Life in Numbers

Our first week of school was spend doing baseline assessments for our students. Unfortunately that leaves very little time for actual instruction, although our district's curriculum map calls for us to begin math and science on the first day.

...alas...

I was trying to think of a way to review/teach place value to our students during this weird time (lots of testing, early lunch brunch, and learning classroom rules and procedures. And in all that thinking, I created a prototype for this!

This 12 page booklet (half pages) applies place value concepts to numbers in student's lives and makes this sterile subject more personal. I hope they would be as excited as I was about this project, and they were! :) ::nerd flag::

Students used the number of letters in their names, their birth year, the population of their city, etc. to demonstrate their knowledge of place value and representing multidigit numbers many ways.

I'm very pleased with the way this product came out! And it fits perfectly in their math notebooks! :)

I love being able to help my kiddos make deep connections to learning!

My hurricane day/weekend has come to an end. I hope everyone has a wonderful, productive week at school!

-Martha

Wow.

What a week! This was the best first week of school I've every had! We are blessed to be able to loop up with our kiddos and they returned ready to work and learn! :) We started teaching math, science and writing right away. One of my summer projects was to create a writing/spelling resource that our students could keep in the back of their writing binders. Having so many students meant we probably wouldn't have time help students with spelling commonly misspelled words.

I wanted something more extensive, so I included Sitton's list of 1200 most frequent words in children's writing. And there are lines for students to add their own words throughout the year.

I was very happy to see that my students liked it...one even said "Thank you, Mrs. Sosa!" It feels good to know that it's something that will be used. :)

There are also pages with transitions and lists of family members, number words, days of the week, months of the year, etc.

You can find this spelling dictionary at my store on Teacher's Pay Teachers. I also have a Zaner-Bloser version for primary grades.

Off the Grid

I've been MIA for a few weeks! Aaaahhhhh....

As I've said before, I have approximately an hour commute, so I've been spending much of my time travelling, setting up my classroom, and clinging to my last few hours of summer bliss.

My boys and I spent a lazy day playing outside yesterday. My five-year-old, Pablo, is starting kindergarten at K12 Virtual School on Tuesday and I'm so excited! :) This is a new venture for both of us, so I'll keep everyone posted.

My youngest son, Eddie, has one more year at home before he starts Preschool. I get mixed feelings at the end of every summer. I know how quickly the school year will fly by. Summer will be here again before I know it, they will have another birthday, and one more year will slip away--Oh, time...do slow down.

Anyway, I wanted to share a few projects that Judith and I have completed in the classroom. Today is the first day of school, and who knows how longs this organization will last! ;)

I'm jumping up and down excited about having such an awesome selection in our classroom library. My co-teacher, Judith, has an obscene amount of books, spanning all genres and interests! I wanted to make a contribution (since she's clearly already spent lots of time and money building her library!) so I set out to organize and level each book.

::gasps for breath::

By the way, this project was bigger, more time consuming than I thought. BUT the I'm so proud of the end result. Since we both are looping up with our students from last year, I wanted to change things up for them and make it interesting. :)

We have squeaky, clean, freshly-waxed floors! And 36 students! And that means lots of annoying screeching sounds when students scoot their chairs in and out when they sit/stand. Luckily, I found this idea on Pinterest! :) It may require a few repairs through the year, but it's a less expensive alternative to tennis balls, and we can color coordinate student chairs and desks!!

It's a fairly easy project and we've gotten a lot of compliments already! I bought the felt at Wal-mart for 23 cents per sheet--cut them in thirds and fold them over to create a 2-ply sheet. Then we just rubber-banded them to the bottom of the desks! The chairs aren't done yet, but we're going to let the students do that on the first day. :)

I wanted something other than letter cut-outs for our content boards, so I made banners!

I have lots more to share, but I have to get read for the first day of school! I wish all my teacher friends well!!! :)

-Martha Sosa