Annie Forest

I LOVE COUNTING COLLECTIONS! I can't believe I didn't know about them before, but after watching an ICTM webinar by Denise Brown ( check out the recording here !), I was hooked! Immediately, I reached out to a few teachers in my district that also watched the webinar. I co-taught a counting collections lesson in each of their classrooms, one kindergarten and the other 1st grade. Wow. It was amazing. Then, I saw another ICTM webinar by Kassia Wedekind ( see that one here !) where she talked about nudges during counting collections. Ah ha! Another amazing idea. Now I wanted to try more counting collections lessons. Luckily, we had a teacher institute day coming up and one of the original counting collections teachers agreed to present the idea to all of the kindergarten and 1st grade teachers. She did an awesome job sharing how she was using the routine in her classroom. Next, I put together a traveling "Counting Collection Collection." I went to the dollar...

Being a new Illinois Council of Teachers of Mathematics board member has me thinking about ways to connect more teachers across the state. I want to put my obsession knowledge of social media/blogs/Twitter to some good use! I've been the main editor of the Facebook page for ICTM for some time now (like the page, if you haven't yet!). I also recently volunteered to help with the Twitter account ( @MathICTM ). I really want to expand the use of these tools to help more Illinois math teachers feel connected outside of our annual conference. While there are some teachers that participate in #MTBoS, I want to bring more of that to our state. A Twitter chat might be one way we could do this. I'm still thinking on this because timing is important to help build momentum and make sure it is sustainable. Evenings are pretty busy for me right now with the kiddos, so I've not been participating in as many chats as I had in the past. I'm sure this busy bedtime phase will p...