Who Knew Vacation Was This Tiring!!!!

So this has been my first real week of summer break.  Between cleaning, packing, new school, trainings, meetings and all that other stuff teachers do , I haven't had time to just RELAX.  Well this week I planned on it, but clearly it just wasn't in the plan for the twins!  They are really good sleepers, so I shouldn't complain, but just once I would like to make it past a 7am wakeup!  


Our days have been spent playing in the sandbox, Playing in our disaster room of fun Playroom, Blowing Bubbles and Eating!!!!  (what a hard life!)  They really keep me hopping as 18month olds get bored with an activity rather quickly!  

Monday and Tuesday are a blur and last night I had a night out on the town!  For my birthday (back in April)  my mom bought tickets for she and I to see the Broadway play Beauty and the Beast!!!!  

It was AH-Mazing!  I LOVE theater and musicals so it was a perfect night!  We had great seats and even though I am very familiar with the story (I am a Disney fanatic!) there were new things to be seen.  

I had a math meeting this morning to get ready for the 2nd round of Common Core Trainings to help teachers implement Pearson Math Investigations.  Do any of you use this program?  

So for my first week of summer break, I am ready for a BREAK!  Anyone else with me????  Summer time seems to be the time teachers use to get ready for a new year, instead of taking a break :)  What Rock Stars we are!!!!

Whoa What a Week!

This was a short week, but man was it packed!  Monday, I sat in front of my computer to work on my National Boards staring at a blank screen, and enjoyed a delicious meal of tacos.  Tuesday, I heard the best news ever, my school is staying open!!!  After the board meeting, my principal, Rebecca, approached me and my other two teammates and looked us right in the eye and said, "Game on tomorrow!" Several months ago when we visited another school and decided to dump our reading anthology Rebecca asked us to present what we had learned to the rest of our staff.

Fast forward to now and I will tell you, its not easy to present to the home crowd!  I had already done this presentation at another school, and knew the material well, but when it came time to present to our staff, I was afraid of how it was going to be perceived by the other teachers.  We didn't want them to think we were 'showing off' or saying 'look at me!'  Well, our worrying was for nothing!  I work with some of the best teachers out there and they were so excited about the change and asked tons of questions and several grades went and downloaded the curriculum immediately to use during their workday Friday.   The conversations between all the teachers was AWESOME!  Also, Amber, over at Adventures of a Third Grade Teacher was able to come and learn more about this program and is planning on using it in her classroom!  Make sure you check her out, she is always sharing great ideas.  In the end, I know that all our students are going to benefit from having teachers who are willing to move into something new because they know its best for kids.

This all happened, and it was only Wednesday!  Are you tired yet?!??!?!

Thursday we had a field trip to the   Gaston County Museum for a program called Let's Build a County Seat.  My students were able to act out a court case and found the defendant guilty!  They also got to learn about what the civil war was like in our area.

Our group learning all about the Civil War 

I think I could've been a solider! 

One of my teaching partners, Erica, ready to shoot the enemy!  Too bad she was fighting with the Confederacy, and she's from Michigan!!!!  Love it! 

And we are now on Friday!  It was a much needed workday!  We spent the morning visiting a school in a neighboring county that is using Pearson Investigations in math as well.  And if you remember some of my earlier posts about this, my team started using Investigations in November and have had huge success with the program.

Thank goodness Monday is also a workday, because after this busy week, I NEED IT!  Now on to work on my National Boards play on Pinterest!

First Week of Investigations Is In the Books!!!

Our county adopted the Envision mathematics series about 3 years ago with the hopes that we would move into Investigations by this point. Too bad that we are STILL working with Envision!!!! And here's a shocker... it sucks! I am not a great mathematician by any means, but I have NEVER had such low test scores as I have had with Envision. The questioning is weird and the overall approach doesn't match with the way kids think.

We got new instructional specialists this school year (who are AMAZING!) who came and met with our 3-5 teachers back in September and suggested that we make a move to doing only Investigations. No other school in our county is doing this. We had always been told to use 2 of the units and the rest was covered in Envision. We have been creating our curriculum map to plan out the rest of the year, gathering countless manipulatives to construct our math toolkits, and copying games and flashcards.

Well our planning and hard work is paying off! This week was our first full week of Investigations and while it is hard work and a different way of thinking and teaching math, my kids love it! They call our math block "fun math" now! I see their little lightbulbs going off everyday. I will keep you posted on what happens as we move through the other units, but for now, its great and we love "fun math"!!!!!