I know we have Inspired Learning Day coming up next week, but this past weekend I felt like there were lots of signs reminding me that inspired learning doesn't just happen on one or two days of the year. And it definitely doesn't just happen within the classroom. The first sign came on Friday night. It was an exciting evening of heading to the grocery store in the Garden house. My husband had a gig so after a really busy week at school, I was switching gears to mom mode. (Even though all I really wanted to do was get into pajamas and crawl into bed!) Every once in a while I like to play a grocery store game with my kids. I bring them to a store, Friday night it was Stop and Shop. I give them each a reusable bag. I tell them they have 20 minutes and they can shop for whatever food items they want. But there's a catch. Friday night I told them they couldn't spend more than $22. And they had to have at least one thing in their bag that counts as "dinner." Emerson brought a notebook and pen with her. Cayce prefers to do mental math and estimation. They tried to ask if they could get other items, not food, which I said no. No to skin care, that's Emerson's favorite thing to buy and no to Pokemon cards for Cayce. I set the timer, they set off shopping, and I was left to buy the essentials like milk and bread. Not only were they excited to do some math while they shopped, but they asked good questions: "Mom, what does 3 slash 8 mean?" or "What does the unit price mean on the tag?" or "What does buy one get one mean?" The high schoolers ringing us up got a kick out of hearing about our game and they cheered with us when Cayce's total came to $20.56 and Emerson's total came to $21.56. In 20 minutes, they authentically learned about decimals, money, estimation, division, and more. They were productive, engaged, and collaborated with each other. And most important, we turned a not-so-exciting activity into a fun experience. The next sign came on Saturday night at the Harlem Wizards game. The energy in the gym was insane. Kids and adults were dancing, cheering, laughing, and spent several hours watching the event unfold on the court. They saw teachers and administrators taking risks and trying something different. They were given the chance at different times to get up and move and to show off their dance moves. They also connected with friends, staff, and the visiting basketball players. The whole event was a model of how we can come together to contribute, support and meaningfully impact our own community. The final sign came on Sunday. My own kids' school was attending the Railers game. (At this point, I was about done with sporting events, but I reluctantly agreed to bring them!) Emerson was selected to participate in a pie eating contest during the third period. Actually Cayce was selected, but he decided he didn't want to do it so Emerson stepped up and said she would take his place. For two periods, she kept saying she was nervous and worried. I kept saying to just have fun and not feel like there was any pressure on her. She ended up doing it and she had fun. She was covered in blueberry pie filling, and was finding it in her ears and in her nose on the drive home, but she was glad that she took a risk and tried something new even though she was nervous...and had never eaten pie before! All of these experiences happened outside of school, but I feel like there are components that we can take from them and bring them into our classrooms and into the school to create many opportunities for inspired learning. Yes, we are going to have an inspired learning day that will provide for new and unique learning opportunities, but we can also think about how to sprinkle those inspired learning moments throughout our lessons. Let's keep thinking of how to authentically inspire kids to have fun with math, to collaborate and communicate with each other, to connect and build experiences that make us laugh until our cheeks hurt, and to take risks, try new things and reflect on their experiences. I got some new books from Bookelicious. One is a picture book called Gibberish, all about a student coming from another language having to learn English. I have a feeling I know some friends who would love this book! And I got two chapter books that I look forward to reading: Simon Sort of Says and The Night Bus Hero.
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With Family Math Night coming up next week, about to start iReady mid-year assessments, and tears in our house last week over math facts, I have had math on the brain! Thanks to Julie Rondinelli, I think she was the one who recommended this math podcast that I tuned into last week: Rounding Up, A Math Learning Center podcast. The episode I listened to last week was called "The Big Place Value Episode." You can listen to it here or read the transcript. What stuck with me was the notion, or really the reminder, that math is all about relationships. Helping kids to see the connections between numbers. Helping kids see that numbers can be bundled to make a new set of numbers. Helping kids to see the connection when trying to remember the six or seven times tables. (That might have been what was bringing on tears in our house last week.) I have one child who sees those connections in his head. He has a strong number sense. Equivalent fractions are a piece of cake for him right now. I have another child who I am dreading when she is working with fractions next year. Those connections don't come as easy for her and then you compound that with a lack of confidence in her math ability. So how do help those kids? For me, it helped to find a YouTube video where someone had rewritten a Taylor Swift song to help practice 6s and to hopefully start getting the pattern to sink in. I also went and asked chatGPT to give me some good points to share about math and number relationships:
We talk a lot about the importance of connecting with our students. Our theme for this year is "Constructing Stories, Building Connections." Just as we strive to build strong connections with our students, fostering relationships between mathematical concepts such as numbers, patterns, and operations can significantly enhance our students' understanding of math. Think about how you can continue to connect the mathematical dots for our students, how you can help them see the bigger picture of math, how we can help them appreciate the beauty that can be found in the relationships and patterns. How can we empower them, all of them, the ones who easily see the connections and the ones who don't, to become confident, capable mathematicians? I read some more of the new picture books that we received from Bookelicious. These were all part of the kindness collection I ordered. Here are the titles: Something, Someday, All Kinds of Special, A Good Deed Can Grow, and The Heart of a Whale. I am also reading a novel in verse with my daughter, Rez Dogs, a book about a girl stuck with her grandparents on the reservation during the pandemic. I love this thought above from Donalyn Miller. Reading is a social experience on so many different levels. Even though we, and our students, often spend time reading to self, as Donalyn says, reading "begins and ends with other people." The authors, the illustrators, the characters...all kinds of people that we get to interact with through books. Some of the most important people are the ones who recommend books to us. As educators, we need to be the ones recommending books to our students. We need to be modeling book recommendations so that they will then become book recommenders to their peers. And in order to recommend books to our students we need to do two important things. Number one: we need to know our readers. We need to connect with them, know their interests, know their reading skills strengths and weaknesses, and know what background knowledge they are coming to us with. Number two: we need to be reading books ourselves. We need to be reading the new picture books. We need to be reading the new chapter books and graphic novels. I know you might be thinking that you don't have time to read. Trust me, I know all about there being not enough time in a day to do all the things. But if we want to grow our readers, and I know all of you want that, then we need to make the time to read and then recommend books to our students. Sometimes it helps to set some reading goals for yourself. Sometimes it helps to put it on your calendar and hold yourself accountable. Sometimes it helps to either start your day or end your day reading some books. I love to spend an hour at the public library, reading through some picture books or browsing the chapter books to see if there is a new title that I know would be a good one to recommend to some students. You can also follow posts by different teachers and librarians who read early copies of books and share reviews. It's always fun to read an early copy of a book and then be able to hype up the book to kids so they are extra excited for the publishing date! Brianna is going to help us create a display in the main lobby display case where staff can recommend books to students. Be thinking about a chapter book or a picture book that you want to recommend to students. There will be an easy half sheet of paper that you can fill out and we will come take a picture of you holding the book. The kids love to see Clough staff in pictures! I can't wait to see what books you recommend! I ordered several book collections from Bookelicious including one that was all books related to kindness. Perfect timing since that is the core value we are focusing on during KCR right now. I wanted to share with you three of the books from the collection. You are welcome to borrow them to read to your class. The first one is called Just Help! How To Build a Better World written by Sonia Sotomayor. Definitely a good read aloud as we begin to prepare for Inspired Learning Day where some of our students have selected Global Citizen as their super power. The second book is called The Blue Umbrella written by Emily Ann Davison. The blue umbrella in the story starts off as very small, but it magically grows in size to help the community and help bring the community together. And the third book is called The Notebook Keeper: A Story of Kindness from the Border written by Stephen Briseño. This book was inspired by true events and tells a story of humanity and kindness even during difficult times. I am starting two new writing classes this term and for one of my classes I am reading the book Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma. The author is actually my professor! Looking forward to learning from her. We are a month away from World Read Aloud Day. World Read Aloud Day happens on February 7, 2024 this year. You can read more about this day and begin to plan for it here. While it's great to have a day devoted to read alouds, we should be making read alouds a priority every day. I love this article that talks about 10 recommendations for teachers to build knowledge. Number 4 on the list says that we should give read alouds a central role. Personally, I would move that one up to the number one spot, but I think I can live with being 4th on the list. The question is...are we giving read alouds a central role? Are your students hearing you read aloud to them every day or at least most days of the week? I do worry that the pandemic changed how we all did read alouds with so many being recorded and able to be viewed on screen. I admit that I even became more comfortable recording myself and sending out read alouds to everyone. It is very easy now to search up many titles and find a recording on YouTube. But our students need to hear the adults in their school reading directly to them with actual books in hand, not on screens. And we shouldn't wait until special days like World Read Aloud Day. The image above is a simple, important reminder of why we need to be reading aloud to our kids as much as we can. I need to get better about doing more read alouds. I have let me calendar and meeting schedule take over and I want to plan to do more read alouds in your classrooms. Please reach out if you want me to come in and read to your class. It can be a picture book that you are using as part of a lesson or I also would love to read a chapter from the books that some of our upper elementary students are listening to. It doesn't take long to read a book, and the benefits of this instructional practice are so worth it! Happy reading! Forgot to add this article in here as well...all about making sure that read alouds don't get lost in the science of reading focus. Some new picture books that I have in my office if you are looking for a new read aloud... 2024, a new year. Over the break, I did a lot of thinking about this past year. 2023 was not exactly one of my favorites. I came across a quote from a friend and jotted it down: Don't dismiss 2023, learn from it. I am going to try my best not to just try to push 2023 into the background, I hope to learn from it. But I do like the thought of tabula rasa. My mother would tell us that Latin phrase means "blank slate." A new year does mean we get to start with a blank slate. A new year is exciting because it's so full of possibility, of potential. We get to fill out blank slate up. I wrote about why I chose this word in my journal over break. There are many reasons but a main one was because for much of 2023 I kept using a different word to describe how I felt...suffocating. The pain and sadness that I experienced at times often made me feel like I was suffocating. So for this year, I decided I need to breathe. I also like that the Latin root word "spir", which means to breathe, comes up in so many other words that I hope to focus on this year. Inspiration - I hope to breathe knowledge and ideas in. Aspirations - I hope to breathe towards my goals. Transpire - I hope to breathe goals and wishes into reality. And of course all of this will require some perspiration - hard work that will cause some sweat to breathe out. I am going to breathe in 2024. What will your one word be? How will you fill your blank slate? I did more writing than reading over the break, but I am focused on getting back into a better reading habit this year. I had started a book before my mom died, but I had to put it away because I know it was too relatable and too sad for me. I picked it up and finished it on the last day of the year. And I am glad I did, I needed to read it and have a good cry. The book is called The Probability of Everything. A sad book about an awful loss for a family, but also an amazing book to read. I also finished listening to the Matthew Perry book, another tough one to listen to. And I started listening to a new memoir called The Faraway Nearby.
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