Why do you act the way you do?
If I’ve thought it once,
I’ve thought it a million times,
Each year, a new kid,
The same,
But different.
I’ve thought,
Why do you act the way you do?
I spend so much of my time,
Trying to really figure out who you are,
Do you not see that I care?
I really, honestly care?
I want you to do well,
To succeed,
And to have every opportunity that you deserve.
If you do see that I give a shit,
Then, I ask again,
Why do you act the way that you do?
What are you so angry about?
Why are you so unfocused?
Why, when people try to help you,
Do you put your back up and then walk away?
Why?
Why do you act this way?
I’ll never know the life you live,
I have a feeling that if I did,
It would truly break my heart,
I can try to understand you,
I will always try,
But at the end of the day,
I do have enough sense to know,
That I’ll never fully get it,
There’s no way that I possibly can,
We’re just too different, you and I.
I do know,
That I’ll keep trying,
I’ll keep turning the other cheek, and then turn I’ll turn it again,
Because I know that tolerance, acceptance and kindness is what you need,
I know deep down that there are a million and one reasons,
Why you act the way you do,
I guess I just wish,
That I could help you to act the way I know YOU want to.
~Krystal~
How do you get through to your most challenging students? What about when they don’t want to let you in?
Who Doesn’t Love a Good Giveaway?
Bump It Up Boards (A Guest Blog Post)
Welcome to Kristy, from 2 Peas and a Dog, my guest blogger for today. Thanks again for such an awesome idea, Kristy. Enjoy folks!
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Need a strategy to improve student achievement? Have you tried Bump It Up Boards? They are a great visual way to help your students self monitor their achievement.
How To Get Started:
Choose a curriculum expectation or focus you see as a need in your classroom. I chose the 4 R’s [retell, relate, reflect, review] reading reflections strategy.
Collect many work samples of your focus. You can use previous student work, ask colleagues for their examples, create your own, use government standardized test exemplars or search the internet for examples.
Ensure your samples represent a range of student achievement levels – not just ones that meet or exceed expectations.
Student Involvement:
Students worked in groups to read the responses and “grade or mark” each response based on their previous knowledge of what makes a good Retell, Relate, Reflect and Review.
A student in each group was the recorder and wrote down all of their ideas on what made the each exemplar a Level 2, (C), Level 3 (B) or a Level 4 (A).
We had a class discussion and compared our answers to ensure consistency among our expectations for Level 2, 3 and 4 work.
Final Process to Create the Board:
Type up student thinking under the appropriate curriculum expectation categories – this will become your Success Criteria.
Type up the assignment expectations and format the graded work samples to fit on to the display board.
Colour code your examples by level and attach to a bulletin board or poster board. Have students reference this board while working on their assignments to self monitor their progress.
Products to Support Bump It Boards
Attitude is Altitude: Inspiring Video for Junior High and Above
Spring Break is here, although it looks more like Christmas Break outside of my window. No matter – a break is a break and I’m blessed to be healthy and sharing it with my boys! So far today, we’ve made rainbow layered cupcakes, had an inside picnic, played in our tent (a blanket draped over the kitchen table) and then our usuals - hide and seek, pirates and Legos! #1 is curled up with a snack and #2 is curled up for a rest and so I thought a quick blog post would be in order!
I wanted to share a video link with you, that our Phys Ed. teacher showed to me. I watched it with my grade 7 class and they really responded to it. It’s all about attitude, choices, thinking positively and believing that you can do what you are meant to do – that you are worth it. We all have challenges in our lives that we will face. What matters is how we deal with and respond to those challenges, and how we can show compassion and empathy for those around us who may be going through their own challenges.
The speaker in this video, Nick Vujicic, was born with no arms and no legs. He battled depression, suffered from bullying and attempted suicide as a child by trying to drown himself in his bathtub. His story is nothing short of incredible. He’s comical, mesmerizing to watch, easy to listen to and he doesn’t sugar-coat things. There is some mature content in that he does refer to relationships, sex and drugs and so this video would be appropriate for grade 7 and up. The video that we watched is linked below and it’s an hour long. However, if you have a look on YouTube, you’ll see MANY videos of all lengths featuring Nick that you could choose from. There may also be another more appropriate video for slightly younger viewers.
Our attitude affects everything that we do. How do you try to encourage a positive attitude in your students?
Making Crystal Shamrocks with Borax to Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day
Report cards have gone home. Parent-teacher interviews are over and March Break is just 2 days away. Life is good!
At report card time, I always have my students do a self-assessment and I have them assess me and my teaching. One thing that a student said in the most recent assessment, was that we don’t do enough “art”. Fair enough. However, they all have an actual ”Visual Arts” class – so don’t feel too badly for the poor art-deprived dears! It’s just that they want more!
Anyhow, we really don’t do much in the way of arts or crafts projects. So, I had a little peek online and I found a fun looking activity. The short version? Use Borax crystals to make a pretty ornament.
With St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I thought – we’ll make crystalized shamrocks for decorations. I really can’t just do something fun without an actual “outcome related” purpose – it’s just not in me! This activity goes along with what students were studying on solutions in Science in their last unit and I also had them write a set of instructions for doing the activity – just in case someone from another class saw the ornaments and wanted to know how we did it. Got to get that purposeful writing in there!
Making a Crystalized Shamrock (or any other shape)
Form a shape with a pipecleaner – a shamrock, spiral - heart, snowflake…Some students may want a template to refer to….
Tie the ornament to a pencil so that you can suspend it in a jar
Add three cups of boiling water to 1/2 cup of Borax crystals
Stir to dissolve
Suspend your ornament in the solution, with the pencil across the top of your jar
Make sure that your shape isn’t touching the sides/bottom
Within 3 hours, crystals will start to form – leave overnight for best results!
The finished product is really cool – crystalized shamrocks!
How does it work? Basically, when you add the crystals to boiling water, more Borax is able to be dissolved creating a supersaturated solution. As the water cools, the molecules become unstable and the excess crystals separate from the water molecules and cling to the pipecleaner.
We had only one “dud” with this activity which was kind of a bummer! A teachable moment, though! Why didn’t Peter’s work? The students figured out pretty quickly that we must have put fewer crystals in his water and if it wasn’t supersaturated, there weren’t any crystals to be released from the water molecules upon cooling and so – no crystal ornament.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
A New Money Saving “Deals” Site for Teachers ~ Educents
I just wanted to let you know that I found what looks to be a promising money-saving “deals” site specifically for teachers. We all know that we spend WAY too much of our own money on our students and in our classrooms. That being said, none of us have any plans of stopping, either. We get what we need for our students – period.
This new site is called Educents and launches in early April.
The bonus? You get a $15 gift certificate to the site JUST for signing up (which takes about 20 seconds). I haven’t used the site since it’s brand new – but I just wanted to share in case it really is something special AND they only have the sign up deal on for a limited time.
Sign up to get your gift certificate now! I figure, we’ve got nothing to lose! We can check out the site when it officially launches in April, see if we like it and spend our gift certificates.
Here’s to buying more and spending less! (My husband will LOVE to hear about this;)
Hope you’re having a lovely Saturday!
To This Day…Have you seen this amazing video? Bullying, name calling, abuse…so powerful!
It’s been so busy here lately, I feel like I haven’t blogged in forever! Hubby’s out of province during the week for another 5 weeks and so I’m pretending to be Supermom, doing it all! That being said, I’d like to give a shout out to all of the single parents out there. I don’t know how you do it. I’m counting the hours until Hubby’s home on Friday evening and he just left at 5am this morning! You’re pretty fantastic people and I can only imagine the stress that you’re under – trying to do it all, all of the time, with NO back-up. You rock!
Okay, topic shift.
A teacher at my school found this pretty awesome video on YouTube and I’d like to share it here. I haven’t shown it to the kids yet. I was in tears though, as I watched it this morning. The subject matter? Bullying, name calling, abuse…it’ got it all and it’s powerful.
If you have 7 1/2 minutes, and you teach middle school and up – have a look. It may be something that you want to share and discuss with your students. It has over 5 800 000 views and is incredibly poignant and thought-provoking.
Let me know what you think – especially if you choose to share it with your students.
Thanks again for sharing, Ms. Curran:)
Inquiry Based Math Lesson on Data Management (Guest Blog Post)
I’d like to introduce a guest blogger this evening, AnneMarie, from Looking From Third to Fourth. She teaches grade 3/4 in Ontario. She’s written an excellent and detailed data management blog post. Enjoy!
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This year I am part of my board’s Junior Numeracy Network, where I work with math consultants and other Grade 4-6 teachers from other schools to develop, implement and discuss inquiry-based math lessons. In between our sessions we have to have another teacher and consultant watch us teach an inquiry-based lesson to discuss at our next workshop.
As I was about to begin my data management unit I decided to do a formative assessment lesson to kick off our unit. Previously when teaching in primary classrooms I have always started by making a class graph based on a survey questions – to engage the junior students I decided to change it up a bit. Here’s what I did.
First we played a classroom minute to win-it like game. Students were giving some conversation hearts (left over from our Valentine’s Math!). They were given 1 minute to stack them as high as they could. Each time it fell they were to start over – but record the height of the tower before it fell.
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| Her stack just fell over! |
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| Page to record data. |
When the 1st minute was up I recorded their data (only at that point we were calling it scores) on our Brightlinks whiteboard.
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I was purposefully recording their numbers in an unorganized manner. Once it was up I asked them a few questions: Which ones were Preston’s? Who made taller towers the girls or the boys? Which number is on the board the most? The students all agreed that we could not answer some of those questions just by looking at the numbers, and when someone told me what number was up there the most and I asked are you sure they quickly said well no, I said can you prove it and they started to hesitate. So we quickly reached our first pieces of consolidation:
*you need to organize information so that it is easy to read
*information that we collect is called data (yes they actually remembered it from the year before – they must have had a great teacher : ) ).
We started again, they had another minute to build and record data. Before I collected it from them we talked about ways to organize it. Some students tried to apply multiplication since that is what we just finished but a few came up with a chart. I was supposed to use tally marks but didn’t in my haste to collect.
They labeled their first loop and put them away. The first part of our lesson was over.
That afternoon I had the students get their paper chains and bring them to our carpet area. I did not give direction about how to put them down. They all started putting them down in the same direction and one eager student started to line them up – but I stopped him for a minute and asked him to let people decide where to put their chains.
Once we had all the chains we talked about how they were displayed – were they easy to compare. The students decided they all needed to line up at one starting point so we could compare them. Yes, consolidation point 3 – our display need to be organized – in this case with a starting line.
Now we could easily compare the chains and see which was the longest.
Lastly, they were asked to make their own graph based on our data. They could choose a blank paper or one with a grid section in the middle. Many chose the grid paper – only to realize it was not big enough to count by 1′s for the scale – and some people were stumped. A few said “Oh, I know what to do” (yes, what a great teacher they had last year). And a few just added squares to the top of the grid (who the heck was their teacher last year!).
Our next steps are to use the paper chains and plot our data on a number line. Then we will find the median. We will also find the mode – we have 3 paper chains that have 19 chains and one that has 23 so we will focus on the mode being the answer the one that occured the most not the one with the most chains. Lastly they will make a model of their chain using paper clips and then we will find the mean by averaging out the paper clips from one chain to the next.
During our computer lab I plan on using this website to continue practicing our skills:
My Blog Birthday Winners, A Canadian Teacher-Blogger Link-Up, and Great Giveaways
This post is a little bit of a mish-mash!
First, thanks so much to all of you who entered (and contributed to) my Blog Birthday Giveaway. The winners of the packages have been contacted and have begun to receive their prizes!
#1 Lesley
#2 Sue
#3 Ursula
#4 Lee Ann
#5 Brianne
#6 Beth Ann
#7 Ann
#8 Laura
#9 Susan
My TPT Store shopping spree winners: Kari and Amanda
Thanks for all of your comments, your follows and your support! It was a great first blog birthday. Here’s to many more.
Second, I just found a new link-up for you Canadian bloggers out there! If you’re a Canadian teacher-blogger and would like to link up – The Adventures of an Occasional Teacher would love to have you!
Finally, some wonderful giveaways for you to enter!
Tammy at Teaching FSL is celebrating her first Blogiversary with a great giveaway and I am so happy to be a part of it. Lots of amazing teacher resources to be won! Head over to her blog to enter now!
Who likes coffee? How about TeachersPayTeachers gift certificates? Fifth is Fabulous is having a giveaway – just because. There’s a $25 TPT gift certificate and a $25 Starbucks gift certificate up for grabs.
If you have a long weekend like me (it’s Islander Day here in PEI tomorrow) – have an extra cup of coffee tomorrow morning and enjoy your day! If you’re back to work as usual, I hope you have a painless Monday;)
What do you have coming up this week in your classroom? We’re working on divisibility, fractions and free verse poetry (among other things, of course).
Celebrating My First Blog Birthday with a BIG Giveaway! $500 in Resources and Gift Certificates to be Won!
**~** This giveaway has now ended. Thanks everyone for making it such a success! The winners have been notified and I’ll wait to hear back from them before I post…**~**
I can’t believe it’s been a year!
I had no idea when I began Lessons From The Middle a year ago, that I would learn so much and meet so many amazing teachers in such a short span of time. I’ve said this before, but the connections and ideas that I get from all of you are simply awesome and I know that they have made me a better teacher. For this, I thank you.
Now, let’s not waste any time getting to the good stuff. I was taught that it’s better to give than to receive. So…. of course I’ve got a giveaway for you!
So many generous teachers and teacher-bloggers have donated their products and gift certificates for this giveaway (you all rock, by the way) totaling about $500 which is simply incredible!
There are NINE prize packages to be won, based on grade level (keep in mind that some items are grouped in one grade level, but may also be appropriate for other grade levels as well – a bit higher or a bit lower). You may enter to win all nine prize packages, or just the ones most suitable for your grade level.
I’ve decided to keep the prize packages a bit of a mystery – a birthday surprise for the winners, if you will. SO, you’ll know the grade level, approximate value and general contents of each package, but not the exact items until you win! Fun, eh? Think of each prize package as a beautifully wrapped birthday gift just begging to be opened! Who doesn’t like a little mystery?
In addition to the NINE prize packages, donated by 95 teachers and teacher-bloggers, there will also be TWO $50 shopping sprees in my TeachersPayTeachers Store to be won. To qualify to win one of these, simply comment on this blog post as one of your entries in the prize package(s) of your choice. Then, I’ll use a random number generator to choose TWO lucky winners from those comments.
I couldn’t have done this without the generosity of all of the contributors for this giveaway – again thanks so much for helping to make my blog-birthday extra special! Follow them in their TPT Stores, blogs and on Facebook; they are amazing educators with so much to offer (plus these follows earn you more chances to win, of course).
PLEASE NOTE: Just in case you’re new to Rafflecopter, clicking the “Follow Me” link on the widget doesn’t automatically follow the stores and blogs of the contributing teachers. It takes you to the store or blog and it’s up to you to follow once you’re there. If it’s a TPT Store, click on the red “Follow Me” above their name. If it’s a blog, look for how to follow them on the side bar – usually there are a few options. When you “Like” a Facebook link, it is automatic and then you can enter.
Also, each of the nine giveaways will have a winner. Therefore, you’ll need to enter in each of the prize packages that you’d like to win. For example, entering to win Prize Package one, will not enter you to win the awesome resources for Gr 7-9 in Prize Package two.
Let the giveaway begin!
Prize Pack ONE
Grade 7-9
My awesome contributors for this prize package:
Prize Pack THREE
Grade 4 -6
My awesome contributors for this prize package:
a Rafflecopter giveaway 
a Rafflecopter giveaway 
a Rafflecopter giveaway 
Prize Pack SEVEN
Grade K-3
My awesome contributors for this prize package:
a Rafflecopter giveaway 
a Rafflecopter giveaway
This giveaway runs Feb 8th – 11th.
Winners will be emailed their products and gift certificate codes, so PLEASE make sure to check your email following the 11th (spam folder too) in case you’re a winner! Of course, you can also check back here to see if you may have won. If you do not respond to my email within a week of being notified, another winner will be chosen.
Thanks for celebrating with me!
Buntings by: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Cat-Lady-Graphics
