week eight: maths, maths, maths

I know, you're looking at the title thinking, 'Uhm, it's MATH. There's no S at the end.' I had a British person explain it to me this way once, he said, 'is there just ONE kind of math? No, there's geometry and calculus and trigonometry and algebra, so why, when we [meaning you Americans] say mathematicS [implying more than one discipline within the whole] do [you Americans] shorten it to math. It's not one thing. It's many things, and so saying math to talk about a bunch of things within a whole isn't proper grammar.' 

I suppose now it is implied and culturally accepted Standard American English, but I took his point. 

It was a big math week at school. First we had Family Math Night on Tuesday 
[We moved tutoring to accommodate Math Night and I learned Hard Lesson Number One: Change nothing. 3 out of 20 some odd kids showed up. Never changing tutoring night again.]

Family Math Night. 

  

Here. Try this. Does it work from there? Does it work from over there?

These foamy footballs just don't have a good spin...

   

'Wait! Come back! You need this!'

 

'Where have you been?!' [yes, my cat is channeling Molly Weasley]

 And then, because I had been away at school for 12 hours, my thoroughly disgruntled cat left her [read:my] room to find me.

More MATHS!!! 

Doubles facts with crayons and BRIO trains. 

 

 

 I've been working with a little firstie who is behind in maths skills. We have the snap together math cubes, but the little guy isn't ready for big big numbers, and these are easier for his little hands to handle. Eventually we will get to bigger numbers where we will have to use them but he's so low, 3+3 equals 5 and 4+4 equals 7. There are trains that go through the community and several kids are wild about them, so I pulled the trains out of the attic and started using them as manipulatives. On Friday I got out the track and set up the bridge so the train was evenly balanced and he watched as the equal parts fell down one side of the bridge or the other. 

 Hey, they stick together like the cubes. They're way more fun than the cubes...

 But numbers past 8 are going to be a problem; I only have 9 cars... Anyone know of an inexpensive source for magnetic wooden train cars? Its not like you can find them at Goodwill...

This might be a little cheezy, but we have a lone bulletin board and I've been trying to figure out something to do with it - yes, I could have gone maths, but I'm not maths oriented and we already do so much reading recovery. When it's done it will say 'TRAVEL - with books!' and there will be the quote from Mason Cooley that says 'Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.' When I got a chance here and there, I'd print one or two off to the printer and then I ran them through the laminator. Our laminator is on all day  - this is probably the best thing ever. Okay, maybe not the best thing ever, but it's the little things. [did you know you can tour Paris from Madeline and Hugo Cabaret's perspectives? Someone has actually google mapped it out!] So, when I have a chance, I'm going to get that quote printed out, and probably punch out the letters By Book! with the fancy letter puncher at school.

Week seven: settling in... Again

Last week was the big news that we were going to have two full time people joining us which meant that we [Erica and I] would be placed full time at one of the two elementary buildings and mentor the other in coming class members. The following Monday we had an inservice - the teachers were writing Student Learning Objectives - which I wish I could explain but after an hour and a half of information and a powerpoint I'm not sure I fully understand it all. The teachers then broke up after the SLO explanations and began writing them and I began breaking down my half of the classroom. [Of which I think there are pictures of in last week's installment] If there aren't, imagine it looking even more bare.

I also talked with teachers from my permanent home and discovered they had come up with a schedule! YAY! Scheduling is so not one of my gifts and talents! At lunch I loaded up my car and drove to my school with all the things from the first place [plus a few boxes of books] and poof.

I've been tutoring a first grader and I kept telling her I'd get my books into the room, so she made me a Halloween book because it took me so long to get my own books in.

Then we had first aid training on Thursday. I named my dummy Fred. Or maybe it was George...
And that pencil isn't actually stuck in my arm, but it is amazing the number of friends I have that commented that it looked like something I would actually do.

And finally, we had out swearing in ceremony on Friday at McKeever Environmental Center in Sandy Lake. I know it's hard to read, but it says:

I will get things done for America

To make our people safer,

smarter and healthier.

I will bring Americans together to strengthen our communities.

Faced with apathy, I will take action.

Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground.

Faced with adversity, I will persevere. 

I will carry this commitment with me this year an beyond.

I am an AmeriCorps member and I will get things done. 

 

And because I found out the new guy likes coffee and the teachers have been running around mugging each other [get it, 'mug'ing eacg other? yeah, I thought it was funny myself], I got got him a mug and some note papers that says make today awesome.

Week five ... Fall Friday Fun

That day you show up and you know exactly where the kids went the day before....

Monster word mash-up... probably should have saved this for Halloween... meh. We had fun.

 

 I taught a kindergartener how to hold scissors, mostly because he was becoming a hazzard to me and himself. {For those of you who don't know, there's this independence thing in kindergarden, where you're supposed to let them go and explore how to do things on their own, but I swear, all I did was say, 'Hey big guy, thumb goes in the tiny loop, fingers go together in the bog loop'. and then he switched the hands he was using and zoom, all of a sudden he was off}  I have no idea if he will remember how to do this on Monday, but I feel like I saw a click moment.

 

Ee is the new letter of the week this week, but they review  week behind so we talked about the letter Bb this week. Bb and Ee together is sort of confusing, especially the capitals. One group used fast as a snap words and built a sentence with Bb words; I see the __________ by the _____________.

[bat, box, bed, bear, bug, etc].
My other group really needed some letter identification work, and they love these flashcards [a free download you can find here!] Capital E you can see is having a rough go of it and is peeling away from it's back
[they're going for a trip through the laminator after school on Monday when I have the time.]

Fridays at NWE are now becoming bring a treat day, so we had

mint brownies, cream cheese frosted pumpkin cookies and apple fritter bread.

How do you say yum, let me count the ways...

In other exciting news, it has become known to myself and my cohort, Erica, that there will be two new AmeriCorps members joining us at Northwestern. What does this mean exactly? It means that there will be two full time people at NWE and two full time people at Springfield and one full time person at the high school. It means that there will be consistency for the staff and students, because they will be seeing the same smiling faces for five days a week instead of three days a week or two or what ever their schedule currently is. It means that Erica will got to one building full time and I will go to one building full time, and a new person will be with each of us, and take over the other person's schedule.

When this is going to happen, we have no idea. Who is going to what building we don't know.  It's supposed to happen soon. We're not sure what soon means. In the mean time it's chins up and onward.