Annie Forest

So much happened this year... both in my "real life" and my teaching life! 1.  I became an aunt for the first time when my sister and brother-in-law had their cute baby girl, Emma. 2.  I decided to switch from teaching 6th grade (which I had done for 6 years) at Heritage Middle School, to teach 8th grade at Freedom Middle School.  I also had to say good-bye to my team, most of whom I had been teaching with for years. 3.  My new school is in the same district, but I still had to pack up 6 years worth of stuff and unpack in a new room.  Plus I had to learn a new school, new teachers, new kids.  Luckily everyone has been friendly and welcoming! 4.  I got married!  (and had to get used to being called Mrs. Forest by my students!) 5.  I convinced my grade level partner to try Standards Based Grading with me... it's been even better than I expected. 6.  My best friend, Jill, moved to Germany.  I miss her! 7. ...

I loved using the Scratch "Hour of Code" Activity for my classes.  The students were really engaged and the tutorial walked them through each step. This week, I wanted to extend the learning for some of my classes, but I was struggling with a lesson to show some more advanced features... but not TOO advanced. These lessons about creating a simple game were great!  We were able to go through Lessons 1-3 in my 45-minute period.  I shared the link with the students so they could try Lessons 4-5 on their own, if they wanted.  Overall the students were excited to be able to program this simple game.

Here are two online resources that a pretty good at showing how transformations work. Game for practicing transformations Reflections (good for showing how things reflect over different lines)

Have you ever heard of Thing Link ?  You can tag images and make them interactive.  Then you can share your image.  I used this to share my student's "Hour of Code" projects.  Check it out!

On Monday and Tuesday my students and I participated in the Hour of Code .  I had my students do the "Scratch" activity where they had to make an interactive holiday card .  I think it went great and my students were really engaged in programming their card.  I think it was well worth the two days of class time it took to participate. Here is my example card (pretty simple) that I showed my students (if you click on it, it should take you to the interactive card): Tomorrow I plan to show how I was able to share the student's projects.

I went to the grocery store after school yesterday and when I was getting back in the car, I caught the end of a story on NPR.  Today I went online to read the full transcript .  It was a pretty good introduction to the basics of standards based grading.  I'm glad the overall tone of the story was pretty positive and explained how they fit well with the new Common Core State Standards.