A Glimpse at 7th Grade

Now that I have a cool iPhone, I've been trying to document activities at school more often with my students. Here's a small glimpse into a 7th grade math classroom...and a few extra curricular shots.

We are in the middle of our geometry unit right now. Part of that involves students using scale to solve various types of problems. Here students are measuring distances on an enlarged map of Central Africa and using the scale to determine how far apart countries are.

We just finished our Wump Project. Meet Zug Wump. Students graph 5 members of the Wump family to discover how scale affects images and how what determines similarity in 2d figures. I always get a kick out of how they decorate their characters!

 

As we moved into 3D figures, students had to learn what the cross sections of 3d shapes are (the 2d shape formed when a 3d shape is sliced). What better way to demonstrate this than to play with Play Dough?!? 7th graders get SO excited about Play Dough!

First you make the shape (not as easy as it looks for some of them)

Then, you wrap the floss around the shape...(Check out the concentration here)

 Pull the floss tight to slice...

 Then, open it up to see what's inside!

 And, record your findings!

 Fun times!

Saturday CATCH Academy. Two hours every Saturday we offer extra help to students who are struggling and/or need time to complete make up work. Teachers and mentor students work together to provide small group instruction for these students. We've done this for several years now with most of it being led by our 8th grade mentors. But this year, they invited some teachers to be a part of it to offer more specialized and standard based help. It is really cool to see students who struggle in the regular setting of a school day thrive and get so much work done in this small, laid back setting!

Check out this link for a cool Flipagram of one of our first Saturday Academies this year!

This is the smallest student on our team on our last field trip. We went to Hillside High School to watch a play and then stopped at McDonalds for lunch. We told students they could not go through the line more than once and they weren't allowed to get up once they sat down. So, what does this kid do? He orders TWO large fries and TWO large drinks. Yes, he finished all of it. We were so thankful that students got straight on the bus to go home when this trip was over. I can only imagine what that much soda did to his little body...

While the three other teachers on my team were coraling ths craziness of 85 kids in McDonalds, this is what I was doing...

  

...hanging out with 5 students who worked quietly all day! This is so rare, but was a nice break in the routine. Not to mention, I got a TON of work done!

If you made it through that entire post, you're awesome! There's just a small glimpse into the life of my classroom.