Experiences Worth Writing About

June 14, 2014
Old St. Patrick's Church, Chicago

The month of June was quite the whirlwind!  I know most teachers welcome the end of the school year with open arms, happy to have summer break stretched out before them with possibilities of relaxation and adventure. For me (Meg), summer break meant something a little different this year.  I got married on June 14 to the most wonderful man, and thus embarked upon a new journey called marriage.

Teachers, regardless of the subject we teach, know that learning starts with making connections to our own experiences, using our background knowledge to attempt to gain access to a greater understanding.  While I am new to this whole marriage thing, I have not doubt it will give me plenty of experiences to use as fodder for future learning.  Likewise, I know I will need to use what prior knowledge I already have to help me navigate the waters of marriage.

Although there are still six weeks of summer break remaining, I cannot help but think forward to the upcoming school year (call me crazy) and how I will start the year with my students. I want to begin by building rapport with my new kids, and what better way to do that than sharing important life stories with each other?  Within the first few days of school, I always engage my students in some type of "about me" activity to start building our classroom community.  I have taught many different subjects over the past eight years, so the actual activity itself has changed in order to make a connection with my content area.  This coming school year, I will be back in 6th grade after a two year stint teaching 8th grade algebra.  My incoming 6th graders won't know much about me given they are new to the school, and those with older siblings who may have known of me will not recognize the name "Mrs. Knapik".  I will certainly need to provide them with some background on me if they are to feel comfortable learning with me.  And since I will still be teaching math, we will likely write math stories about our summer adventures to help us get to know each other.  This can be done briefly by writing their stories as blog posts, or this can be done with more depth by creating digital stories.

Patara Elephant Farm
Chiang Mai, Thailand

Thai Baht and US Dollar

I adapted this math story idea from Char Forsten's Math Talk, or telling number stories from illustrations, in the elementary classroom.  My honeymoon to Thailand and Bali gave me plenty of opportunities to use math from understanding the exchange rate between the US Dollar and the Thai Baht or Indonesian Rupiah to learning about the life span and diet of the Asian elephant I took care of for the day when I visited an elephant farm in the hills outside of Chiang Mai.  I will be able to share my experiences with my students, and in doing so they will not only learn more about who I am, but they will also notice they have more background knowledge about math than they may have initially thought.

What kind of experiences will you have this summer that will be worth writing about when returning to school in the fall?