Daily Message

“Today is yesterday’s tomorrow.”

Every day, someone in the neighborhood posts a message on the outside of their fence. This fence faces a “busy” road, so every day, I get a read their message on my way home.

The messages are fairly short, as each word is spelled out with individual letters that are printer page-sized, a different color, capitalized, and in a page protector. Sometimes they are encouraging, sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are thoughtful.

I don’t know when the message is changed, but there is a new one every day. I think it started around March (at least that’s when I started noticing it), and it’s still going strong.

Thank you, neighbors, for the little bright spot on my drive home.

Pumpkinheads and Signposts

I just read a great, great book today: Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks. I loved everything about it: the storyline, the characters, the setting. it completely transported me to fall, even though I was reading it by the pool in the middle of summer.

When I’m not reading excellent YA or middle grade books of all types, I have been catching up on some professional reading. I buy all of these great PD books, and then never read them. But not this summer! This summer, I have diligently read about 1 book per week or so, so I have crushed my PD library.

The PD book that I am the most excited about is Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst. I have never sunk into a PD book like I did with this one. I actually looked forward to reading it every day and was savoring it so that I didn’t finish it too quickly. I loved their writing style and how easy it seemed to try out their ideas. (I actually did try out some of their ideas in my virtual summer book club with good results.)

So, as I bask in the afterglow of a reading such a good book in one sitting, I am thinking about the Notice and Note Signposts and how they appear in this book. (Mostly I just want to spend more time with this book.)

Brief summary before diving in: Josiah (Josie) and Deja are friends finishing up their last season working at a pumpkin patch. It’s their last day together, and they decide to try all the snacks and find the girl that Josie has had a crush on for four years.

Note: There are 6 Signposts and each has a question that the reader is supposed to think about after recognizing a signpost.

Contrasts and Contradictions: Despite being Most Valuable Pumpkin Patch Person (MVPPP) for five of the last six months, Josie breaks all sorts of rules to get to his crush, including skipping his last shift of work.

• Why would the character act this way? Last day to talk to his crush; if he doesn’t do it now, he will never get the chance to.

Aha Moment: When Josie, after finally talking to “the girl”, realizes what he really like about working at the pumpkin patch. (No spoilers here!)

• How might this change things? You’d have to read to find out. 🙂

Tough Questions: Deja asks Josie if they will see each other after the season.

• What does this question make me wonder about? Why don’t they hang out outside of work? Is Deja sad about it being their last day together too? What kind of friendship is this?

Words of the Wiser: Deja tells Josie that he is not going to miss out on talking to his crush today, because it is his last opportunity. “You’re going to take your shot.” (p. 11)

• What’s the life lesson and how might it affect the character? Josie definitely seems like a cautious person, so maybe he will learn to take more chances and put himself out there more, be more confident.

Again and Again: As they hunt for Josie’s crush, Deja and Josie kept getting sent to different places where she is supposedly working. Every time they go to a new location, they are told that she isn’t there. This happens again and again.

• Why might the authors bring this up again and again? To give the characters time together, to see all the sights one last time, to give the characters time to talk about their friendship

Memory Moment: The book opens with one! Josie is looking at the MVPPP wall (with lots of his pictures on it) and gazing sadly at his nametag, thinking about how much he likes work and all of his successes so far.

• Why might this memory be important? It tells us a lot about Josie without any words: he is sad, he likes his job, he is good at his job, he has been there for several years.

That was fun. I can’t wait to recommend this book to someone. Thanks for analyzing the book with me!

A Little Fall of Rain

On my walk this morning, it started to rain a little bit. A drizzle, while the sun peeked out of thick, pink clouds in the early morning light. A few other people braved this unpredictable weather, all of us unsure whether we should head back home or carry on. Would the rain stop? Would it rain harder? We didn’t know, so we proceeded to walk the dog or push the stroller or listen to music as the tiny droplets of rain freckled our shirts.

It was actually a pleasant sensation for the most part, like walking with a mister that followed you wherever you went. It kept the temperature down and the sun off of our faces and shoulders. Plenty of time for all of that later in the day…like now. No one seemed all that irked by the rain. It’s so refreshing to get a break from the bracing summer weather (humidity, sunshine, heat), that no one minded the rain.

At different points of my time outside, it rained harder and less hard. Always unexpectedly, but never enough to feel damp. Never enough to make me turn back; probably not even enough to make less-motivated exercisers stay indoors. Mostly enough to remind all of us that we could use more rain, and isn’t it nice that it’s not hot outside yet, and look at those beautiful clouds.

When I got home, my husband asked me if I got wet. “A little,” I replied.

(Title from the musical Les Miserables)

Summer Camp #sol20

One of my student’s goals for our virtual math summer camp is to “recognize and explore math found in everyday life”. I have taken that as a personal challenge to expand what my students think of as “math”. So today, we made tessellations.

Photo by Iva Muu0161kiu0107 on Pexels.com

I like tessellations because there isn’t anything obviously “mathy” about them, except for the fact that you’re working with shapes (geometry), patterns (so many patterns in math), and aesthetics (mathematicians always say that math is beautiful). So, actually, they are very “mathy”, but they don’t involve numbers, so students tend to think about them differently. Which is great, because it allows for different kinds of math students to thrive.

We started by looking at a few examples and talking about what we noticed. Then, we started making our own using this tool.

It was really amazing to see who struggled with this task and who shined. The students who often describe themselves as “bad at math” made some really beautiful patterns, including an amazing radial design that I was blown away by.

Upon reflection, this activity got an enthusiastic response from all of my campers. It was nice to start our time together today with lots of thumbs-ups and smiles.

We’ll see what they think of the Open Middle problems that we are going to work with tomorrow.

P.S. I love getting to try out all of sorts of new tools and strategies with my campers/beta testers this summer. I didn’t really think I would have this much fun with my virtual math camp (thought I certainly hoped that I would!).

Notice and Wonder #sol20

It was a rough morning before I even walked into my classroom. I guess the day can only go up from there.

And, of course, it did.

One of the classes that I teach is an accelerated 5th grade math class. They tend to know a lot of the material that we are learning already, so I like to gauge their background knowledge at the beginning of a new series of learning.

We did that today with angles and angle properties.

I learned a lot about them as mathematicians (they don’t know how to name and write angles), inquirers (what is the point of this diagram?!), and thinkers (they know about angles around a point and on a line, but they don’t know about opposite angles).

This is a “notice and wonder” activity, a format that I learned about from 3-Act Tasks. I don’t post a question along with it, because I am genuinely curious to see what they see and are thinking about when they look at it.

I like walking around the room and listening to them talk about math. I like listening to them figure something out (that sharp intake of breath), and I like listening to them argue with their group-mates. I like giving them the opportunity to get curious about something without having to “find the answer”, and I like watching them grapple with what to do with someone else’s wrong noticing (we rotate around to each problem in small groups). The math class is loud and excited, and they get to practice so many skills in this short activity: collaboration, thinking, questioning, debating, reasoning, explaining.

Just a little look inside the math class that pulled me out of my funk from this morning.

What actually is a thousandth?

With my 5th graders today, we looked at decimals. Specifically, we looked at what decimals actually look like. I like getting concrete with my 5th graders because they think they are so “over” manipulatives. (insert eye roll here)

We took a piece of paper and established it as one whole. Then we cut it into ten pieces. We identified one piece as one tenth of one whole.

Then we took one tenth and cut it into ten pieces. We identified one of those pieces as one hundredth of one whole.

Then we took one hundredth and cut it into ten pieces. We identified one of those pieces as one thousandth of one whole.

We did a lot of talking about those pieces. How many tenths are in one, how many thousandths are in one tenth, how small those thousandth pieces are. (Some intrepid mathematicians created ten-thousandths, 0.0001, and those were really small.)

It was fun to think about math this way. And hopefully it will give us a good foundation to look at decimals in a more abstract way in the future.

(P.S. I promise all of my posts won’t be about math. We have done some great language arts things as well this year, like start Front Desk by Kelly Yang as our first read aloud.)

Back to School

Yesterday was not a good first day of school. There were several things outside of my control that overshadowed a lot of good things that I did with my students. Sigh.

But today was a new day (I just love that about teaching…everybody gets to start fresh every day, including me). And today was much better

Two students experienced great success in my 6th grade math class today. Neither of these students particularly like math, but they were the only group to actually finish today’s task (they were the only ones even close).

The task was from Jo Boaler, looking at different 2D views of a 3×3 “city” of different colored columns that were different heights. They had to create in 3D the images that they saw in 2D.

These two were the only students to look at proportion and actually assign numbers to the different heights to help them build it. They were the first group to see this as a 3D “shape”. They completely collaborated and finished so quickly they had time to work in the other direction: draw some of the views that weren’t originally represented. They were 100% focused, doing 100% good math, thinking in both 2D and 3D.

Pretty good for the second day of school.

Lunch Problems

There is a lot of food wasted at lunch. Lunch is included in the tuition at the school where I teach, so all students eat lunch at school. Every student gets a plate with the same foods on it, except for students with allergies or other dietary restrictions. As you can imagine, there are a lot of foods that the students won’t eat. All of it goes into the trash. The teachers have been trying to do something about this for years. We proposed a number of solutions, all of which were shut down by admin and/or kitchen staff.

A group of my students is studying hunger and wanted to take action about all of the food that we, an economically-advantaged population, waste every day. They proposed having students line up at the counter and only take as much as they wanted, with the provision that they had to have at least a little bit of everything that was being offered (i.e. no skipping the salad every day).

They created a short persuasive speech for the principal. I told them that the teachers had suggested this before, so they might not be successful. I was really hoping it to work, because it was a good solution to a real problem at our school. They went to talk to the principal and the kitchen staff, and I crossed my fingers…

It worked.

Today is the first day that we will be trying buffet-line style lunch service for the 4th and 5th graders. It looks like the best messengers at my school are the 11 year olds.

 

Productive Failure?

I occasionally worry that I don’t provide enough opportunities for my students to fail in a productive way. Am I giving them a chance to learn from their mistakes? Am I showing them that it is OK to not succeed at everything? Am I preparing them for life?

And sometimes, it just happens without trying at all.

Well, I didn’t try, but my students did. Well, they didn’t try to fail, but they didn’t try very hard to succeed either.

We are near the end of a big student-created unit. One component of this unit is each group of students needs to take action in some way around the school or in the community. The unit is done next Friday, and everything has to be presented on that day. So while we have some time, we don’t have a lot of time.

This particular group is learning about hunger. They tried connect with a local farm to do some kind of work with them and learn more about food in Austin. They contacted several farms, emailing back and forth, trying to see if we could go as a class or if they could go as a group. Lots of emailing, not a lot of actual planning.

They finally decided to go to this farm yesterday after school, when the farm was having a work day. They decided this last week, with plenty of time to organize rides and tell their parents what was going on and get the required permission.

And then they came to school yesterday, without any of this being done. They tried to cobble it together, but it was pretty messy. There were lots of unanswered questions. At pick up, the parents were trying to figure this all out.

They did not go to farm yesterday.

So today they had to start from scratch. A lesson learned in planning and organization. Sometimes things fall apart. Sometimes, it’s ok to start over.

Matchmaker

I have some pretty amazing books in my classroom library. The problem is getting those great books into the hands of my students. Book talks help, but they take awhile and you can only talk about one book at a time. Recommending books to students works too, but then I am only reaching one student at a time. I just got a bunch of new books for the library. How can I get my students interested in them?

Speed dating!

I had all of the books out, with 1-2 book reviews written by 5-6th graders accompanying them. Students could read the reviews, read the back of the book, open the book and start reading. For one minute, that book was theirs. And when the timer went off, they had to rotate to the next one.

It was quiet except for the timer dinging every 70 seconds (10 seconds for transition). I joined in, because some of the books I hadn’t read and some of them were so good that I just wanted to spend a little more time with.

In the end, there were quite a few books that my students decided to spend more time with. There were lots of second dates planned. Even some third ones, based on conversations among students who wanted to read the same book.

Just call me the Matchmaker.