I love introducing my students to new puzzles over the course of the school year. I often pull out strimko puzzles (a logic puzzle that is often compared to sudoku puzzles) on days when I am missing a large portion of my students due to activities or events. In a strimko puzzle, you must place …
I am super excited about these daily date magnets I created for my classroom this year. Remembering to rewrite the date each day is a huge struggle for me, so I decided that by making them into magnets I might somehow motivate myself to keep the date updated. I typed up the days of the …
I recently received a request to share my Puzzle of the Week Poster. So, I thought I would turn it into a mini blog post in case anyone else was interested in setting up their own puzzle of the week station in their math classroom (or any classroom). Each week, I put up a different …
I created this classroom display to show off the different modular origami projects I have created over the years from sonobe units. Almost every year, I make origami sonobe hexahedrons and cubes with my students. Some students opt to create additional sonobe units to create larger units. Now that I have them hanging from the …
I typed up a Google Classroom poster that I will be hanging up in my classroom with the code for each period of the day. This past year was my first year in a 1:1 environment and my first year using Google Classroom. Every time I got a new student this past year or had …
Usually, I’m a big fan of decorating my bulletin boards. Hello, I have an entire page on my blog dedicated to bulletin board designs. This year, after moving classrooms for the second time in two years, I decided to take a different approach to bulletin boards. I still decorated the walls around my bulletin boards, …
During the first week of school, I took a page from Sara VanDerWerf’s playbook and showed my students the escalator and beagle videos mentioned in this blog post. I highly recommend you read about how Sara uses these in class. I basically copied everything she said! The escalator video is especially moving. Whenever I watch …
I have a laminated poster that says “Today is.” Each day, I try and remember to write the date as a math problem. This is a trick I picked up from my cooperating teacher while I was student teaching. Students HATE it because it makes them do a bit of extra math to figure out …
I want to share a 2 Nice Things Poster I created for my classroom. Two nice things is an idea I stole a long time ago from Elissa Miller. When a students says something mean toward another student/themselves/anything, they have to say two nice things about that same thing. So simple yet so powerful. …
Under my Today is Poster, I have my birthday poster. My This Week’s Birthdays Poster was inspired by Hannah‘s My Favorite at #TMC16. At the end of last year, I overheard a student tell another student that he had been the only person to wish them a happy birthday. Her parents had forgotten it was …