How do you tell a teacher to Shut up!!

Listen today was my second Fosnot class on fractions and I need to shut up. I need the kids to pull the ideas out of their own thoughts instead of having me prompt and push them to the right answers. I need to relax and "let it happen."

The joy of teaching a lesson 4 times as I get to do is that by the 4th time I should have figured out all the problems and it should be a perfect lesson. As the day progressed I spoke less and less and let the kids figure out the path that we would be learning. It almost worked. Going through the last lesson the "congress" or math meeting was moving along smoothly when I needed to step in.

I pushed to hard to get where I needed to go. AARRGG . Baby steps. Next time I will hold my tongue longer and the needed result will happen.

Fosnot Day 2

The second part of the Submarine Sandwich assignment will be having a "Math Congress". This is a math meeting where students become mathematicians and explain their work. I am looking forward to this day. It will be my job to make the class and the presenters go in the right direction. I will need to maneuver them their with a hands off approach. I need the rest of the class to push the participants to the "needed end point".

I need the class to see:

• Fractions are division
• the size of or amount of the whole matters
• with unit fractions, the greater the denominator, the smaller the piece is.
• when naming a piece, the whole matters.
  

I am hoping that these congresses soon will be published on the web. I will record some and create podcasts. I will also take pictures of all of their work and post them in a pictobrowser.

Day 2 is going to be great!!

Dunk Tank is over!!

Job 1 done Now to the hotdogs!!

Stopped me in my tracks

Running over the railway walk bridge on the way to work I had just passed some runners when to my right this happened.




One of the great things about mornings is the sunrise. Soon it will be gone as I will be up too early. Ah well. The Treherne Marathon is on the weekend and there are lots of hills but it is a great race. I have a cold so I won't do a personal best but it is a pretty race so I won't mind. Hey any race that serves homemade muffins at the finish line has me coming back!!

Now off to the dunk tank.... brr it is still only 5 C here.

Fosnot Math Day 1

I was excited to start teaching fractions with context today. This is one of the goals C Fosnot has given me in my math teaching this year. We started with a problem about field trips and the students were actively participating. It is amazing when good questions are posed how entertained and enthused students are about math.

Now that they have answered the question they have to present to the class what they have learned and it is my responsibility to get the "big ideas" out of the presenters and the class. The class will have to be trained to be good listeners and the presenters will have to be trained to be good mathematicians. I am looking forward to tomorrows class and congress.

Meet the Teacher Post Party

As usual the crowd was sparse at meet the teacher. We had about 20 parents out of the 140 students that we teach. Ah well.

Ahem Ahem.... they liked my video and are enthusiastic about what the year has in store for their students. I am too. Interesting side note to the video. I chose to use 2 year old scribeposts because they showed off better in the movie. Last years scribes used so many other applications that they were to complex for the video.

Parents on board. Kids on board. Scribes start Monday.

This summer I took part in a Fosnot workshop. I blogged about it here, here and here. Tomorrow I put this work into practice. This will mean a big change for my class and for my own pedagogy. I am looking forward to this change.

Oh and this stuff that I will be teaching is so...... blogable!!!!! As JenW would say GRINS

AARRGGG Network and Meet the teacher

The new Novel network we are using in our division is giving me fits. It will be great once whatever is going wrong on the other end (not my fault!!) gets fixed. I have been without network access on my Mac for 3 days. Boo hoo I know.

Here is why I am ranting. Check this out. For the first time I asked students to get Google Accounts at home instead of at school. I should have figured this out last year..... they all (90% of them) have done it at home. I will now create a screencast for joining their class blogs and ... wait for it ... we will be up and running. These kids are amazing.

Tomorrow is meet the teacher. Last year I used this post to welcome parents to . SargentParkMathzone. This year I am cranking it up a notch. I created a video hyping up why 2.0 and 21stC learning is important to me and my pedagogy. I hope they like it.

Here it is

I'll tell you how it goes over. I used the video Sheryl posted and mashed it up a bit.

The Students are back

It seems to me that the students are back. Yeah time to influence a new class of eager math bloggers. All aboard.....

Post 101

Hi everyone this is my 101st post. I never thought 2 years ago that blogging and all the other 21stC learning would be such a part of my new pedagogy. I have eclipsed the century mark. I hope to be at 200 next September.

I passed another milestone this week. My kids, all three of them are in school full time. Wow time flies. Soon they will want car keys and be eating me out of house and home.... wait they already do that eating thing.

Ah they are fine looking boys. Now back to k12online presentation creating.

I'll write more soon.

A new year starts

Wow the week is almost over and boy did it fly. I have 4 new classes and they seem eager and keen. Next week I get them all, all 140 of them signed up to their class blogs. Here are their links:

816
817
841
873

The class hub will still remain the same. Sargentparkmathzone and we will be diving into wiki's and video this year.

Our school network has been down for two days. No network contact with all my friends in the blogsphere has made me feel very alone. When brief twitter, and bloglines reading were not possible I started to feel disconnected.

I hope I can give my students a feeling of connectivity this year. We will be embarking on a terrific journey. I hope you will come along for the ride.