Annie Forest

I'm using this interactive graph tool to illustrate the effects of changing the slope or y-intercept on the graph of a line.  This tool is nice because you can also show the table.

Have you ever made a wordle ?  A wordle is a word cloud.  You can use any text and the more times a word appears in the text, the large it appears in the word cloud.  You can use wordle in the classroom or in life!  I recently had to keep track of the food I ate for a week and turned it into a wordle just for fun.  Looks like this baby is getting a lot of cheese, pretzels, oatmeal, and greek yogurt! :) Baby Bump at 24 Weeks!

I am having my students do a weekly reflection on Fridays.  Check them out here: Regular Math Classes Blogs Advanced Math Class Blogs Each Friday they will answer 5 reflection questions on their blog: 1. What did you learn in math this week? 2. How are your grades this week?  Are they better, worse, or the same as last week? 3. What is one interesting thing you read this week? (fiction or non-fiction) 4. What is one act of kindness you did or observed this week? 5. Free choice reflection. (about music, TV, weather, movie, friends, family, sports, clubs, etc.)

A little late with the bump pic this week.  I'm at 23 weeks already!

I love to celebrate wacky holiday is my classroom .  However, today's holiday isn't so wacky.  Today is " Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day ."  This one is close to my heart because I have a BS in Civil Engineering.  I actually worked for 2 years as an environmental engineer before deciding to go to grad school to become a teacher! Me at a Hazardous Materials Training back in the day. :) Middle school is an especially important time to encourage girls to appreciate their successes in math and science.  There is still quite a discrepancy between the numbers of men and women going into the field of engineering. Today, my warm-up (bell ringer) is going to be to have students explore some links about engineering... both boys and girls. 10 Reasons to Love Engineering Engineering Careers But I do plan to especially make sure I have a little 1:1 moment with girls that I think would make great engineers!

So today I'm blogging about having my students blog! :) I decided to have my students create their own blogger blog and use it to reflect on things they are learning in class.  I set up a class blog to post assignments and to add their blogs to the blog list.  I intend to assign different topics for them to blog about as well as to have them comment on other student's blogs. So far we went over safety (don't use last names, only school-appropriate content) and they have 2 posts assigned.  I'll let you know how this project goes, but so far it's been working great!

The Standards for Mathematical Practice are the place to start even if your school/district isn't fully implementing the CCSS yet.  You can use these practices with your current curriculum.  If you are implementing CCSS, it is a good idea to refer to these practices often and make sure that you are addressing at least 1 or 2 per lesson. I have seen some "kid-friendly" versions of the practices, but haven't come across some that are "middle schooler friendly" meaning not too babyish!  I put the practices into my own words-- words that I think are appropriate for mathematicians in grades 6-8.  You can click here to download my " Middle Schooler Friendly Standards for Mathematical Practice ."