"Connecting the Dots" between the Coordinate Plane and the Real World

Although we have been a bit MIA from the blog the last few months, we have been fully present in our classrooms.  Both of us have been working tirelessly to keep our middle school students engaged despite the numerous days of testing that come along with the spring season.

Sometimes, some of my (Meg's) favorite and most successful classroom activities are those that require no technology at all...a good, old fashioned, back-to-basics type of activity...and then we will follow up with a little blogging, of course.  ;)

The coordinate plane
on our classroom floor

As my sixth graders and I began our exploration of the coordinate plane, our classroom floor was just begging to get involved.  Our classroom floor is comprised of square foot tiles which create the perfect grid.  All I had to do was lay down an x and y axis with my trusty red duct tape, and we were ready to go!  With the tables moved off to the side of the room, the students of course were immediately intrigued as they walked into class.


"Where do we sit?"
"Why is that stuff on the floor?"
"Wait, is this like Battleship?"

Using the coordinate plane
to create polygons

The kids then became a part of a kinesthetic lesson, moving around the coordinate plane from quadrant to quadrant, and then taking on the role of specific ordered pairs based on their exact location on the floor.  Conversations were had about reflecting points about the x and y axis and why (0,0) is called the origin (gotta get that academic vocabulary in there, too!).  Our favorite part of the activity was when a few student volunteers stood at various points about the coordinate plane and held the same piece of yarn to form a polygon.  Simultaneously, the remaining students were plotting the same ordered pairs on their own coordinate planes.  The students were able to "connect the dots" to identify the polygon, which ultimately led to conversations about classifying polygons, perimeter and area.  (Don't you just love when you can connect multiple math topics into one conversation?!)  To end this class, we sent out a class Tweet to share with the world what we learned.

The next few days, we did some more kinesthetic coordinate plane activities to start each class, but we spent the majority of our time working with the pictorial representation of the coordinate plane.  The students also did some research on how coordinate planes can be useful in real life and blogged about their findings.  Many students made connections in their blog posts between the coordinate plane and the game Battleship and using maps.  However there were other interesting real-world connections I would not have thought of myself, like this student who discovered how artists can use coordinate planes and this student who remembered a video game designer who had spoken to her elementary school and explained how coordinate planes were used in his job.

Not only did this lesson allow the students to get up and move, but the blogging was a great way to integrate literacy into our math classroom.  The students could "connect the dots" between the coordinate plane in math class and how it is used in real life.

What are some of your most successful kinesthetic lessons?  How have you recently used blogging with your students?  We always love to hear from you!

Tackling Persuasive Writing Via Our Blogs

Venturing out of our comfort zones, my students and I are tackling our next blog post.  Our goal is to make you (the reader) see our blogging topic in a new light and to perhaps make you take action.

Anchor Chart

We started the blogging process back in October with a discussion about the different types of writing and/or purposes for writing.  A student made anchor chart hangs in our classroom as evidence of our learning.  Before each blog post, I encourage students to decide on their purpose for writing their next post.  Persuasive blog posts seem to be my students least favorite type of writing.  Therefore, we are embarking on this journey together to write a persuasive post.

Before we began our drafting, we revisited the characteristics of persuasive writing.  During a 10 minute mini-lesson at the beginning of writers workshop, I had students reflect on their prior knowledge to build a web. This was a student led activity as you can see in the picture.
When we finished with activating our prior knowledge, we began drafting our persuasive posts.  As the students began their drafting, they could watch me drafting my own post. Yes, the one you are currently reading!

Student Led Mini-Lesson

Even though we are writing blog posts, writers workshop has stayed the same in my classroom.  Through mini-lessons I am still teaching my students about grammar, sentence variety, attention grabbers, etc.  We work on drafting, revising, editing, and of course publishing.  The only thing that has changed is the fact I have embraced technology to allow for creativity and engagement.  Recently, I heard Ellin Keene speak at WSRA. She talked a lot about the importance of student engagement.  Her presentation reinforced what I've been doing in my classroom this year with blogging.   As I look out at my students right now, I see my students in various stages of the writing of their persuasive blog posts.  Some students are brainstorming with others at their tables.  Some are typing their drafts in a Google doc. Some are researching their topic for information or inspiration.  They are ALL engaged.  A smile sneaks across my face as I snap a few images of them working.  It is a teacher's dream to see kids intellectually and emotionally engaged in their writing.   My students are creating!  They're at the top of Bloom's Taxonmy.

Many of my students love to work on the carpet--not at their desks.

So, why should teachers blog with their students? I recently posed this question to my students to gain some valuable feedback.  I was pleasantly surprised by their responses.

One of the most popular student responses was the fact that they enjoy the self-selection of topic. Many students also commented on liking the fact that they could add images, links, and videos to enhance their writing.  Another popular response was made about enjoying reading each other's blogs and making comments to one another.  Students felt like they were getting to know their peers better. And, they felt like they were learning a lot about topics that they did not know much about.  Listen below to  Leah's thoughts on blogging.  She writes a DIY blog, and has won a Bloggy award for best blog in my English classroom.

#MathSelfies

I know I have mentioned before that the sixth graders at our school are piloting one-to-one iPads this year.  As a result, I am constantly looking for new ways to help my students bring math to life using the iPad, both in and outside the classroom.

If you have contact with adolescents, I am sure you have come to realize that selfies are all the rage right now.  (True story: the sixth grade teachers started to see our students experience storage shortage on their iPads due to the number of photographs they had taken/stored on their iPads!)  I have had my students take pictures of real life math they have seen before on their iPads to use as support for blog posts, but I had never before issued a selfie request...so I thought maybe it was time I did.

Thank you to Erin and her mother for sharing their #mathselfie!

In addition to incorporating students' interests (ahem, selfies), there has been research for years that highlights the importance of parental involvement in education.  I thought our current unit on rates provided the perfect opportunity to include parents in the learning process.  The task I gave my students was to find a real-life advertisement (authentic learning task) and explain to their parent/grandparent/babysitter/guardian (an important adult) why this advertisement shows an example of a rate.  I also sent an email blast to parents/guardians to make them aware of the assignment and provided them with pointers for ensuring their children were on-target with their explanations, as well as some questions they could pose to further probe their children's thinking.  In order to prove this conversation occurred, the students were supposed to take a math selfie with their guardian and the real-life rate advertisement.

Thank you to Alex and his mother for sharing their #mathselfie!

When we gathered back together in class, we displayed the math selfies on the iPads and did a gallery walk to view the different photographs.  During the gallery walk, students recorded observations (science connection!) on a T-chart to note similarities and differences seen between the various rates.  We then proceeded to share our observations to create a class list, and we made connections from this list back to the conversations the students had with their guardians about the rates they found in these advertisements.  Not only did the kids have fun with the selfie assignment, this provided a great opportunity for dialogue focused on content-specific vocabulary as it relates to the real world.  To me, that's a win!

What authentic learning tasks have you tried lately with your students?  How have you provided students with the opportunity to bring their interests into the classroom?  We would love to hear your ideas, too!

Turn Them Loose and Let Them Blog

Blogging continues to be one of my (Jamie's) favorite ways to integrate technology into my English classroom.   This year I am exploring using blogs to provide my students with the opportunity to write about a topic of personal interest.  There is much research out there to support allowing students to choose freely.  In the words of Lucy Calkins, “Choice matters. Not a little, but a lot.”  

What do you like to do in your free time?
 What type of books do you like to read?
What kind of foods do you like to eat?

To kick off blogging this year, we did a lot of brainstorming about personal interests.  I started with a simple stick figure.  Students were asked questions, and then they were given a few minutes to respond with corresponding thoughts/ideas on their stick man/woman.

The center represents things we love the most.

A few days later, we drew a heart map in our journals to provide us with a space to write all the things we are passionate about.  This activity is taken from Nancy Atwell’s Lesson that Change Writers.

When I felt my students had cultivated enough ideas, we began discussing blogs.  In our book Literacy Lessons for a Digital World, Meg and I suggest having your students view the Common Craft video on blogging to introduce any blogging lesson.  The video provides a clear explanation of what a blog is and how it is used.  Before blogging, I also shared mentor text.  My mentor text was of course a blog.  I showed them our JMLiteracy blog. We discussed my interest in ed-tech, and why I would choose that topic to blog about with Mrs. Knapik.  Modeling for your students is a key component to good teaching.  By showing my students that I am a blogger, I am showing kids that I practice what I “preach”. 

My students were then assigned the task of drafting their first blog post.  Their goal was to write an introductory post about themselves and their blog topic.  We took our blog post through the writing process, and then we published to our classroom blog.   The kids were really excited because they knew their audience was beyond the scope of just the teacher’s eyes.

Wait!  It gets even more exciting.  After posting, I took blogging one step further.  I collaborated with another English teacher in my building to provide an audience for my students’ blogs.  Mrs. Horrigan’s sixth graders read my seventh graders’ blog posts and left comments on their blogs.  When my students saw that comments were left on their blogs by other students, the bar was further raised.  My students immediately began comparing who got more comments, and I used this as a teachable moment.  Why did some posts get read more than others?  We went through the blogging checklist (scroll to bottom of this link to download checklist), and we discussed the characteristics of the blogs with the most traffic.

Take a look at a few of my students introductory blog posts and feel free to leave a comment.

Fashion Blog
DIY Blog
Reading Blog
Free Time Blog
Nature Blog

QR Codes Transform Our Math Classroom

If you have read our blog before, you will remember when Jamie wrote her exciting post on engaging with QR codes at the Henry Ford Museum.  This year I (Meg) am teaching sixth grade math again, and we are piloting one-to-one iPads.  Having a brand new device in my classroom was both exciting and challenging at the beginning of the school year.  Some of my favorite web-based activities were difficult to do on the iPad.  For example, I could no longer have my students create a visual math glossary using tables in Google Docs like they did in the past because the Google Doc iPad app does not allow users to create tables or insert images.  Instead, I needed to look through a new lens when I was designing tech-related activities since the capabilities of the iPad are vastly different than those of a netbook, our previous one-to-one device.

Math Super Stars QR Code Bulletin Board

One unique capability an iPad offers is the ability to scan QR, or "Quick Response", codes.  I definitely wanted to harness the potential of this tool in some way in my math classroom.  One of the most common uses for QR codes in the classroom is to use them in conjunction with book trailers.  Students (or teachers) create book trailers, and then a QR code is created and taped onto a book so that when it is scanned the person can view a book trailer for that particular book.  As a math teacher, this idea wouldn't work for my every day use.  However I loved the idea of using QR codes to connect to student-created work.  I also found that my "Math Super Stars" wall was still empty after the first month of school since the students were doing less work on paper than they used to.  My idea started to form...

Close Up View of QR Codes on My
Math Super Stars Bulletin Board

My students had some experience using the  Educreations iPad app to make math video tutorials to explain their thinking.  Sometimes they would do this in relation to correcting an error made on a formative assessment, and other times I would specifically assign they use the app to explain their strategy for solving a real-world problem related to our learning objectives.  Once I figured out that each Educreations video had a unique hyperlink, I know my QR code dreams could become a reality.  I launched my Math Super Stars bulletin board with a brand new purpose: students whose videos not only showed correct problem solving but also included clear explanations rich with math vocabulary would be featured on the Math Super Stars board.  In the past month, this board has become a way to showcase and honor exemplary problem solving, and it is also a useful resource for students that is always accessible in my classroom.  Before summative assessments, I now have students who choose to spend time during advisory scanning these QR codes as a means of clarifying their understanding in review for the summative assessment.  I know I have just scratched the surface of the potential QR codes have in my classroom, but I would say my first experiment has been a success!

Have any of you used QR codes with success in your classrooms?  We would love to hear your ideas, too!

A New Twist on an Old Favorite: Traveling Concept Maps

The other night I was watching a video lesson from Teaching Channel with my grad school class.  Our class is called "Supervision of Learning Environments", and the purpose in watching this video was for us to determine whether or not this particular teacher revised her teaching strategy after a lesson was not quite as successful as she had hoped.  Sarah Wessling, the teacher in the video (who is stellar, by the way!), certainly did adapt her plan for the class, and I loved her new idea so much that I adapted the idea for my sixth grade math class!

Sarah had her students use what she called "traveling concept webs" in her high school English class to have the students generate ideas related to The Crucible and connect them to modern day themes.  I have used concept maps before, but never had I had them "travel".  I love the collaborative aspect to this idea, and I envisioned this as useful way for my students to review for their chapter one summative assessment.
Plus, I always love integrating literacy into math...cha-ching!

Each of my six small groups of students had a piece of butcher paper with a math topic in a center circle, forming the hub of the web.  The six topics on our concept webs were Number Lines, Prime Factorization, GCF, LCM, Squares & Square Roots, Cubes & Cubed Roots.  Each group had three minutes to add supporting details to the web related to the definition of the concept, helpful strategies, and example problems using a variety of methods.  Once the timer sounded to end the three minutes, the students rotated one group clockwise (It was also great to have the kids up and moving a bit).  This time the directions were slightly different.  The students needed to first read everything that was already on the concept map, correcting anything they felt was not accurate.  After doing so, they could then continue adding new information.  Once again the timer sounded after three minutes, and the students rotated.  The third time around, the students were directed to read and correct any information, and they were issued an additional challenge to create a more difficult example than the ones previously listed.  The final three minute buzzer sounded, and students returned to their seats.  The activity culminated in a gallery walk where the students had the opportunity to quietly look at all six concept webs.  On post-it notes, students wrote and posted questions remaining on each topic's concept web.  These questions not only were formative in nature, allowing me to see where there were still some misconceptions and confusion, but they were also wonderful collaborative conversation starters.  I had the students lead the follow up discussion themselves, answering each other's questions using appropriate math vocabulary and our class experiences as support for their answers.  I was truly impressed with how articulate many of my students were, and I always love seeing them help each other learn.  So two thumbs up for this activity!  I'm keeping traveling concept maps in my arsenal of secret weapons for use in the future as well.  :)

What Do We Have to Fear?

Blogging Challenge Day 30 (Last Day!)

What would you do (as a teacher) if you weren't afraid?

Jamie- If I weren't afraid, I would probably leave my job as a classroom teacher to start my own

educational consulting business.  I'd also like to be a full time writer.  What stops me?  My students! 

I love being in the classroom surround by the enthusiasm only kids can possess.  I love to see the light bulbs go off when they truly understand a concept.  I love nurturing them as readers and writers. I love to challenge them to do their best.  I like helping them down the path of becoming an adult.  It is a great privilege and honor to have the opportunity to touch the lives of our future.   Teaching brings me the greatest joy, and I am afraid to walk away from it to follow my other dreams.  Perhaps the right opportunity will present itself one day.  Right now, being in the classroom is where I belong!

Meg- If I weren't afraid of meeting deadlines, the impending PARCC test, and the opinions of
parents, I would definitely spend all day every day examining all of the *cool* real-life math that is out there.  Now this doesn't mean that I don't do real-life math.  It just means that I definitely follow more of a guided path based on the CCSS and the collaborative plans the other math teachers and I create together.  I also would never be afraid to try a new project with my students because I wouldn't be afraid of running out of time.  Time always seems to be the biggest issue when a risk I take in the classroom goes sour.  I have just "wasted" precious time that I cannot get back.  I try to keep my adventurous, creative spirit in mind as I plan to allow for some of my risk-taking and plain old FUN real life math to wiggle its way into my classroom.  I just had to make sure I am balancing it with all of the other standards I am actually "supposed" to be doing as well.  :)