Hello CONNECTors!

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I hope that you felt the same excitement of the new year school year that I did!  I always enjoy a fresh start, meeting new students, and getting the chance to make improvements to classes I have taught before.  The energy that the start of the year brings helps me get through the initial exhaustion. Over the summer, I easily forget how tiring this profession can be!  I’m just now starting to get used to the school routine.

One of the biggest challenges for me this year was deciding how to start!  There were too many activities that I wanted to do to get to know my students, build mathematical mindsets, and get students collaborating on challenging tasks.  I could not possibly include every single task that I wanted. After the first week, I hadn’t even started any “content” for the courses! However I know that these opening activities were crucial for the set up of the rest of the year because they built academic safety, helping students believe in themselves as mathematicians.  Some of the resources and tasks I used during the first week were: Sara Van Der Werf’s Name Tents (https://www.saravanderwerf.com/week-1-day-1-name-tents-with-feedback/) and 100’s Task (https://www.saravanderwerf.com/100-numbers-to-get-students-talking/),  Fawn Nyguen’s Visual Patterns (http://www.visualpatterns.org/), and Robert Kaplinsky’s Open Middle problems (https://www.openmiddle.com/).  I will continue to use these resources throughout the year as I’m taking steps to make my class into a Thinking Classroom.  To learn more about the Thinking Classroom, this Edutopia article gives a good summary: https://www.edutopia.org/article/building-thinking-classroom-math.

If you need any help getting started with the Thinking Classroom or finding quality tasks, let me know!  I would be happy to help. I am also available if you would like to have someone outside of your school or district to bounce ideas off of or talk about teaching math in general.  If I can’t help, I can always find someone that can. There are people in all areas of the state who are more than willing to help. Additionally, there are a couple of different mentor groups that communicate via text message and social media throughout the year.  Please reach out if you would like to be in one of these mentor groups. Teaching is a difficult job and we, the CONNECT Committee, want to you to support you in any way we can.

– Kristen (khelland@isd91.org)