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. Strimko puzzles are one of my favorite …
General Classroom Posters
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 …
Today I want to share a set of new SBG Posters I created. This year, I have decided to switch from my A/B/Not Yet SBG scale to a 1-4 SBG scale. When I tweeted about stopping A/B/Not Yet, I got several questions about why I was making this decision. I absolutely loved the A/B/Not Yet …
I spent most of this morning making new posters for my classroom and most of this afternoon writing quizzes (4 versions of each) for our first unit in trigonometry. Today I want to share a set of What Should Your Answer Look Like Posters. I think it’s finally hit me that school is RIGHT around …
One of my favorite strategies to use during group/team work is red/yellow/green cups. I have also heard these referred to as traffic light cups in the past. I bought a package of each color of cups at Party City a few years ago. I’m still using the same cups, so they’ve held up well. I …
A continual focus in my classroom is helping my students build a growth mindset. One quote I’ve seen time and time again when it comes to growth mindset is “Mistakes are expected, respected, inspected, and corrected.” I’ve seen this quote attributed to Jo Boaler and her “How to Learn Math” course. This summer, I decided …
Today I’m sharing left and right posters with you. I feel like I need to apologize in advanced because this blog is getting ready to be taken over by posters. I’ve got a new classroom to decorate, and I’m taking full advantage of that fact. (There’s also the fact that my husband has a new …
I’m excited to share these new TEAMS Group Work Norm Posters with you today. I think I’ve finally gotten over my “Oh my goodness school is out and grad school is done and I don’t have to do anything productive” phase. Yesterday, I wrote out a new SBG skills list for Algebra 1 for next …
This year, I am having a terrible time getting my posters to stay on the wall. Every day, I play the “let’s see how many posters fell down overnight” game. #sofun This summer, I made a set of Convince Me posters. They started out hanging under my dry erase board. But, every day, I would …
I want to share a set of cardinal direction posters I created. I’ve had left and right signs up in my high school math classroom for multiple years now. If you’re not a teacher, you’re probably reading this and thinking I’m crazy. But, if you are a teacher, you know why they’re up there. Sooooo many …
Elissa posted her weekly warm-up schedule, and it inspired me to think about how I want to structure my warm-ups this year. 2014-2015 Weekly Bellwork Schedule Well, I’ve decided on my weekly bellwork schedule for the upcoming school year. This past year, I had 3 special weekly tasks – Good Things Mondays, Weird and …
I saw this GRIT poster on pinterest, and I decided I had to recreate it for my classroom this year. G – Give it your allR – Redo if necessaryI – Ignore giving upT – Take time to do it right Here’s my typed version of the GRIT Poster. I have formatted this GRIT Poster …
After a few weeks of relaxing and traveling, preparation for the next school year is in full swing. I’m the crazy type of person who likes doing school stuff during the summer because I can do it at my own pace without a million deadlines looming in front of me. I can stop to read …
I’m excited to share a new What Zone Are You In poster with you today. So, it’s Saturday morning. I told myself that I was going to spend all day Saturday working on getting all of my activities planned, quizzes written, and copies made for the upcoming week. Let’s see. I’ve finished a novel this …
Okay, today I’m sharing yet another idea I stole from Ilana Horn’s Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics. You could say I’m kinda obsessed with this book. I’m feeling so much better at attempting group work in my classroom after reading this book. To encourage student conversation during group work time, the author …
I created a YET poster to hang in my classroom. This poster was inspired by Ilana Horn’s Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics. In the book, Ilana Horn talks about how the word “yet” is missing from our students’ vocabularies. If a student says, “I can’t do this,” we need to correct them. …
Today, I want to share some please and thank you posters I created for my classroom. These are words I want to hear more in my classroom. I decided if these words are that important to me, they need to be on display in my classroom as a reminder to myself and to my students. …