School Lately

This first part of the year has made me feel like a first year teacher all over again. When I started at Liberty in January, my 6th graders were at a point in the curriculum where I could incorporate a lot of my 7th grade materials. However, that isn't so true for the beginning of the 6th grade curriculum. So, I've been planning a lot of lessons from scratch. We've been doing a lot of basic skills like fractions and long division so I've tried to make it as fun and hands on as possible.

Long division is a struggle so we had to spend some extra time practicing that. We did a sidewalk scoot where students do a problem and then scoot to the next. They seemed to really like it and it kept them engaged a lot longer than doing a bunch of problems on a worksheet.

We used M&M's to practice writing and simplifying fractions because who doesn't love M&M's?!

Then, to review adding and subtracting fractions, I pulled out the shapes. This activity was okay, but most of them are already really good at adding and subtracting fractions so they didn't need this step, but it was fun to play with the shapes!

We had Gear Up week last week...kind of like a mini spirit week with the emphasis on careers. Part of the "celebration" was a door decorating contest. The theme we were given was careers. I searched Pinterest for ideas and they were very limited! Most of the doors I found focused on going to college. I did see this idea embedded in one pin and did my own twist. I had each student write what they want to be when they grow up on a whiteboard and took their picture. Then, I printed the pictures, laminated them, and cut them out to put on the door. I totally didn't have time for this, but it was one of those things I got in my mind and just made myself do. Why I felt the need to laminate them, I'm not sure...that just added in a lot of time. But, I won the contest! And, the students have loved looking at the pictures. Now that they're laminated, they can keep them when I take them down if they want. I set the bar high for next year...maybe we'll have a different theme!