Sleepy Wednesday

Today was a full day. Apparently there can be two Mondays in one week; my students proved it today. I am hoping that tomorrow is like yesterday; it was a fun day and we had a lot more involvement in the lessons.

I have had some fun doing some quick assessments on my students this week. We are learning plotting coordinate pairs by putting points on a graphing plane. Yesterday and today we had "mystery pictures" that could only be revealed if they followed complete instructions and connected the right lines. We did an outline of Utah and a 3-d image of a house on the coordinate plane...and within about ten seconds, I could tell which ones weren't with me. I have been stressing the importance of following instructions in several of my routines (i.e., in my Morning Math Problem, I will show five plotted points and ask them to name THREE. Even with it underlined, they still don't read that I only want three points named...so I give them a "way to go, I am glad you can find all the coordinates, but I can only give you points if you followed all the directions." I think it is starting to sink in.

This is an interesting group to teach. None of them have ever worked with a textbook before (their math last year was primarily worksheets and packets, through a spiraled curriculum called "Excel Math") so I have been learning to teach skills like finding the directions to the problem set, how to organize the paper on which you write your answers...even how to navigate certain pages. It is quite the experience.

That's what's new... I love my work, and I am pretty energy-less by 4pm. Catch me on a Saturday at about 7 am...then I'll be a little more alert. Gone are the days of sleeping in, but I am kind of liking the targeted bedtime of ten o'clock.

Looks like tonight I am 18 minutes past curfew. Time to go to sleep.

Oh! But not before announcing, proudly, that my students earned the privilege of watching their first Planet Earth of the year! I'll let you know what they think.