After only 3 days, the MS Math Teachers survey collected 81 responses! I am truly awed by this. I’m excited to find so many middle school math teachers who are so eager to connect and help one another on our amazing journey this year! If you haven’t responded yet it isn’t too late! Just click here to fill out the Middle School Math Teacher’s Survey.
By far my favorite response was to the question, “What would you like to get out of Twitter / blogging / network”. Here is what you all said.
You are all interested in learning, sharing, implementing, and getting NEW ideas. I am inspired by your desire to always be learning. I am currently working on compiling all of the survey information. The first thing I plan to do is to put the list of MS bloggers on the Middle School Math Blogs page (found above). Please feel free to add this to your blog as well if you would like.
For now, here is a snapshot of who we are and what we can do! A GIANT category in the “special interests / area of expertise” was “Others”. After investigating, I found that the “other” was most often foldables. I cannot believe that I did not include that as an category in this question, especially after I did a session on Foldables at #TMC12. It seems like they are more currently popular in middle school. I seriously love you teachers!! 🙂
Middle school is an amazing place! And those of us teaching middle schoolers truly love it! They are fun, energetic, exciting, and most of all, new to higher math. A few months ago I discovered many amazing middle school math blogs. In the past few weeks, I have found even more middle school math teachers on Twitter. I am so excited to learn from all of these teachers.
I plan on compiling a list (and will make a Twitter list as well). I have a few other ideas floating around in my head that will enable us to share resources and help each other out during the school year. Also, use and follow the hashtag #msmath when talking about middle school math.
If you have any ideas, please add them to the comments below! What do you need to make yourself an even more amazing teacher?
When Sam requested that I make a video for his Mathtwitterblogosphere website, his instructions were to “be creative if you would like”. I would have loved to be creative and made up a song instead of just (awkwardly) talking. But, he needed it asap and since I was post #tmc12 and pre-company, I didn’t have the time or energy. However, when I was browsing through Michael’s last week I saw these and it gave me an idea.
They are iron on letters. The letters were only $3 for the entire package. And right below the letters, were blank t-shirts for sale – and for only $5.99! They were cute too, fitted, cap sleeved t-shirts in multiple colors, for $5.99!! I have never done iron on letters so $9 didn’t seem like too much of a risk. The result?
This was amazingly easy to do and only took about 10 minutes. I was amazed at the results! First, you have to prewash your shirt (no fabric softener). Then, you just cut out the letters and iron them on. I measured and would recommend starting your letters about 3″ away from the top of the shirt. I put mine a little too high. You need a piece of cotton to place over the letters so they don’t touch the iron. I just used a white cotton t-shirt. You only have to iron it for 30 seconds on each side. There are at least 20 different designs, so you don’t have to go all pink and sparky, unless of course, you want to!
Seriously. If you are a teacher, and you aren’t on Twitter (or at least reading math teacher blogs), you are seriously missing out on an amazing experience. There is an entire network of brilliant math teachers who are very active on Twitter. They are constantly sharing links and sending out tweets that contain information that is helpful and relevant to what I teach every day. Here is what I see (and participate in) on Twitter everyday:
Lesson planning – a teacher will have an idea that needs developing. He/she will tweet the beginnings of an idea. Multiple teachers will read this tweet and make suggestions. More teachers join and make more suggestions. The idea grows and develops. In minutes, you have an amazing idea that is more that you could have ever thought up on your own.
Links to amazing resources. – When teachers find a great idea, a new game, a cool graph, etc. they will tweet it out for all to see and enjoy.
Networking – It can be difficult for the too few, too busy teachers in your department at school to try to help you out during the day. On Twitter, there are hundreds of teachers for each subject area. And they love being on Twitter, and they love to talk to other teachers that teach their same subject.
Help – If you need something, tweet it! Chances are, there is an amazing teacher out there that has exactly the resource you are looking for. It is much more efficient than trolling the internet.
Support – Teaching is hard work, and we have some bad days. There is nothing better than 15 – 20 teachers tweeting you warm fuzzies when you need it the most. They’re going through it with you, and their words mean more than those from family and friends because they actually understand.
I just spent five of the most amazing days of my life at “Twitter Math Camp 2012” or #TMC12. I have been anxious to blog about it since I came home. However, I have also been simply overwhelmed with all that it was. I doubt that I can convey to any reader the enormity of this experience, or how much it has changed me and help me grow as a teacher. I feel like the best way for interested teachers to get a true sense of what #TMC12 really was about, is to read all of our posted experiences and quilt them together (links to other blogs at end).
When trying to explain this conference to my non-teaching friends, I tell them. “Think about the best teachers that you ever had. Put them all in one room. Ask them to all tell you their best ideas and strategies. Listen in awe. Take tons of notes. Learn from the best.” This was a meeting of the most creative, innovative, and inspired educators that I have ever been privileged enough to know. Everything said this week was important, and relevant, and will directly help me with my students this year. In fact, I will be lucky if I can even try out a fourth of the things that I leaned about at Twitter Math Camp. These teachers are doing amazing things in the classroom.
How was I lucky enough to be part of this? I am an impassioned educator who loves to talk about teaching math, all the time. Just ask my family, I drive them crazy. Thankfully, I found a bevy of great folks on Twitter to talk about teaching math, 24/7. Since I found them a couple of years ago, we have talked practically non-stop about teaching math, planned lessons together, given each other great ideas, participated in book studies, and generally just supported each other through the thick and thin of teaching. I love to talk to them because they love to teach as much, if not more, than I do. They are always working, planning, wondering, and thinking up new ideas for their students and their classrooms. They are all brilliant, and fun to talk to as well! So much fun in fact, that we all started talking about getting together, to meet, in real life. It started out almost like a joke, and I pushed hard for a cruise. I even made a wiki page for the cruise! But, time passed and we went back to our crazy, hectic, teacher lives. At least until two amazing teachers, Lisa and Shelli, actually decided to do something about it. Thus, #TMC12 was born.
I have been to multiple conferences in my many years of teaching. This was by far the best PD (professional development) that I have ever attended. What made #TMC12 so much different, so much better? The key was that this was a teacher’s conference, by us, for us. We knew what we needed. We cut straight to the point in our presentations. There was no wasted time. I appreciated that and really felt like these amazing teachers are my people. They understand me and knew what I needed. They don’t think I am weird for wanting to talk about teaching all the time. They can’t wait to discuss a great idea as well. And we never stopped talking about teaching. We talked about it over breakfast, all day long, at lunch, dinner, and even when we were hanging out at night. And we had so much fun at night! After a whole day of cramming our brains full or math and teaching ideas, we loved hanging out together even more at night. But we never tired of talking about teaching! We could be in the middle of a song, have an idea, and stop singing to talk about it immediately. One verse later, we would jump right back in to singing (or dancing) again. We even talked about education up until the very last minute, when we waited, together, for our departing flights in the airport. Education was our undercurrent.
I learned more in these 5 days that I have in a year of reading blogs. At the end of each session, poor Lisa had to cut us off. We were so excited about each presenters ideas that we would have talked for hours. My educational highlights for the week included:
Talking about how students learn, developing new lesson ideas, and learning new ways to present slope with the Math 1 folks.
Learning about many more uses for whiteboards. (Mistake camp).
Daily Favorite Things sessions (which will continue through the year via blogs – YEAH!)
Developing ideas for how video can be used to improve the classroom instead of just “flipping” it.
Collaborating post-session with multiple teachers about the best way to represent integer subtraction.
Many side conversations about homework
Giving ownership back to the students including numerous ways to get students talking about math and working together in math class.
Interactive Notebook Nirvana
Meeting people (not related to me), that had actually read my blog.
Discovering (in the airport) that even teachers I greatly admire wonder if they are good teachers. It made me feel so much better about my teaching and my failures.
Technology, technology, technology. I may never even have a chance to try all of the amazing new websites that I learned about! I wish I had taken better notes (thanks Rachel).
Math club collaboration
Marshmallow guns shoot much harder (and farther) than you think.
Having FUN in presentations with the presenters (even if it was off topic or off color sometimes)
Jinx Tweets! When people would think about the same thing, at the same time, and tweet it. It was unreal how much this happened. Our brains work alike.
My personal highlights:
Bonding with people immediately even though I was so nervous about going and talking to people I had never met IRL.
Finally meeting everyone that I had been tweeting for years with and discovering that they were all exactly like their tweets!
Just that feeling that you have when you are surrounded by people that totally get you, and still like you, for who you REALLY are.
Doing “The Squirm” with my math class song mentor, Sean. He even offered to write me a song for my class (love).
Finding several other teachers that wear their purse cross body, on the right side.
Making stupid jokes that people laughed at bc they have my same weird sense of humor.
Feeling comfortable being as loud as I wanted to be. (Thank you all for putting up with me).
Having an enormous group of people who also sing at random just because they hear two words that makes them think of a song. (Actually, having tons of people who would just sing with me, at random, whenever I started singing. I didn’t even have to ASK!)
Going around in a giant group – EVERYWHERE.
Square dancing on the sidewalk in the middle of lunch just because we thought of it.
Teaching a movie theater full of people to dance before a movie – and everyone did since my friends were all into it.
A whole world of people that are as obsessed with office supply stores as I am!
Dressing up like Sam
Getting less sleep than I did in college because I never wanted to stop talking to these amazing people about math and teaching!
Generally just being around people that are CRAZY fun, more crazy fun than I ever thought people could be.
TWEET ME MAYBE! (thanks for the extra credit Sean)
My only regret was that even though I stretched every day to the limit, I did not have enough time to talk in depth with all of the people that I wanted to talk to. Everywhere I looked fascinating conversations were happening all around me. It was almost impossible not to get completely immersed and remember to move around. I’ll definitely be coming back to #TMC13 to pick up where I left off.
I felt like I was with people that “got me”. And I loved that many of the Twitter Math Campers even thought the way that I did. In fact, if I said (rather sang) this blog post title out loud (TMC – People Just LIke Me!), I now know a few people, IN REAL LIFE, who would sing, “You’re down with OPP, Ya you know me!” in their heads, if not OUT LOUD, with me. They are smart, fun, quirky, real, and down to earth people who truly care about other people and are willing to sacrifice fame and fortune to change the world. They care about education, they are serious about their jobs, and they love their students. They are an amazing group of math teachers.
If you are a math teacher out there who wants MORE, then I implore you to explore Twitter and start reading blogs. We will help (Twitter/Blog newbie website coming soon)! In fact, if you don’t tweet, you should definitely read the words to this song that Sean, Rachel, Sam, Dave, and Bowman wrote at #TMC12. It should resonate with you. We want to help you! So, “Tweet Me Maybe” at @jreulbach!
Tweet Me Maybe
by Rachel Kernodle, Sean Sweeney, Sam Shah, David Peterson and Bowman Dickson
I sat alone in my class,
Hoping my students would pass,
Prepping was kicking my ass
But help was on the way
I started searching the net,
To find a way to connect
Found teachers I’d never met
and I was on my way
Dan’s blog was poppin’,
G-Reader, feed not stoppin’
Each day, I would drop-in
Guess it’s time for hop in!
Hey, I just found you, And this is crazy,
But here’s my ID, So tweet me, maybe?
It’s hard to reach out, Please don’t flame me,
But here’s my ID, So tweet me, maybe?
Hey, I just found you, And this is crazy
But here’s my ID, So tweet me, maybe?
It’s hard to reach out, Please don’t flame me,
But here’s my ID, So tweet me, maybe?
Oh holy crap can it be,
Nowak responded to me,
Blogging math celebrity,
She’s twitter royalty
I beg, and borrow and steal
No reinventing the wheel,
What are these urges I feel?
Nerdy math sex appeal
Hal-lo-ween was awesome
Dull worksheets, I could toss ‘em
My, i-deas could blossom
Now it’s time for Math Camp, baby!
Hey, I just met you, all in person.
Twitter Math Camp, this was the first one
It’s hard to teach right, in i-so-laaaaaation,
So here’s some PD, just like va-ca-tion
Hey, I just met you, all in person.
Twitter Math Camp, this was the first one
It’s hard to teach right, in i-so-laaaaaaation,
So here’s some PD, just like va-ca-tion
Before I came onto your sites,
I must’ve taught so bad,
I must’ve taught so bad,
I must’ve taught so so bad
Before I came onto your sites
I must’ve taught so bad
and you should know that
It was so, so sad
I loved free pizza, and the brew-ry.
You know my ID, So tweet me, maybe?
Ci-ty Muse-um, or the Card’s game,
So tweet me sometime, I won’t be too lame
So, thank you Shelli, thank you Li-sa.
Don’t want to go home – so glad to meet ya
Now that it’s coming to an end
we’ll miss you so bad
we’ll miss you so bad
we’ll miss you so, so bad
Before you came into our lives
We must’ve taught so bad
And you should know that.
So tweet me, maybe?
Other Blog Posts About TMC12 – These are the blogs that have been written as of today. If you have written a blog about TMC12, please put the link in the comments so I won’t miss you!
I teach middle school, so by the end of the trimester, student’s spiral bound math notebooks are pretty beaten up at best, and downright nasty at worse. So, at the beginning of each trimester I have students start a brand new notebook for my class. At the end of the year they each have 3 beaten up, spiral math notebooks.
I did not want my student to just take these notebooks home – as I knew they would probably end up thrown out! So, I decided to have them use their three notebooks to make make ONE Math Reference Books.
They went through each of their three notebooks and tore out what they felt was the most important pages (keeping the pages in date order). Then, they compiled these pages to make on concise Math Reference Book. They used the back cover of two of their old notebooks to make a new front and back cover for the new reference book. Then, they tied them all together with yarn and decorated the cover.
I had the students make a pocket for the inside of the notebooks as well so they could keep any chapter or study guides we had made. It was very interesting to see what pages most students decided to keep. Almost all students selected the pages with foldables on them. One student ONLY kept pages that were foldables!
I kept their Math Reference Books in my room and will give them back next year to use in class when they have questions or get stuck on review problems. I will also let struggling students take theirs home when they need more work or remediation.
I am hopeful that this will be a resource that will help jog their memory when they forget a concept or procedure (since it contains notes that they took in their own handwriting). I would also like for them to see the value of taking good notes through these reference books. I also like the fact that all of their hard work from the year before is not thrown away and forgotten, but used as we go forward and built upon previous concepts.
As a middle school math teacher, I have been having the students take their body measurements for the past two years. They usually stand up against a post, use a whiteboard and sidewalk chalk to mark their height, and then measure themselves. Every month when they measure each other, I have a LEAST one student who exclaims with much dismay, “Oh my GOSH! I SHRUNK – BY TWO INCHES!!” Of course they didn’t shrink, but trying to convince an “eager to grow” middle school student of this fact, especially after they were SO proud the month before of how much they had grown, is almost impossible. And of course, they had charted their imaginary grown spurt the month before – in PEN no less.
There are several errors they make when measuring their height. One, they don’t hold the whiteboard straight, ever. Two, my tape measures are only 60″ long, so they have to hold their finger at 60″, measure the remaining distance, and add the two measures together. Also, their accuracy will depend on whether or not they are standing up against a flat surface. Many times students stand against the whiteboard and measure themselves, then let the tape measure loop around the eraser tray but don’t take off that extra couple of inches gained.
Luckily, I found these very cool Komelon flat shell measuring tapes with adhesive backs at Amazon.com. There are a couple of different brands out there, but these had the best reviews. THEY ARE FABULOUS. They are STEEL, so they can withstand middle school students and will resist pencil markings. They were CRAZY sticky, so they will NOT come off. They were 12 feet high so they went up my entire 8 foot wall! And, they were only about $4 each. I ordered five of them, and hung them on the walls today. I cut off the first 4″ so that I could install them over the baseboards for greater accuracy.
Hopefully, I won’t have any (or at least not MANY) distressed, shrinking middle school students this year! 🙂
On a side note, I woke up to another amazing measurement solution on Pam’s Blog. I had never thought of buying the vinyl ones and hanging them. She is much craftier than I. I love that we both picked the same week to blog about the same thing. I’ll say it again, Twitter blogging math teachers are AMAZING!
I read about the amazing Tin Man project on Elissa’s blog Misscalcul8. Please go there and read all about it in more detail! I had to duplicate it for my 6th grade students. They love being creative and surface area is tricky.
At their request, I let them make a tin man or animal. The students chose their materials (they had to have a cylinder, a rectangular prism, a sphere, and a cone). They then had to measure their materials and find the surface area of each item. (My Tin Man Project Worksheet). After the surface areas were calculated, they added it all up to find the total surface area of their tin man and how much foil they would need to completely him. I created a Google Spreadsheet to automatically check all of their answers according to the measurements they had recorded. This was essential for grading ease since every student had different materials and thus different measurements. Then, they taped their tin man together, measured and cut the foil, and covered their tin man/animal in tin! After they finished, I had them do Elissa’s reflection as well. To save paper (and printing issues that students always have), I uploaded the questions to Google Documents. Students had to copy the document to answer the questions, and then share it with me for grading.
A best aspect of the project was applying the aluminum foil to their tin men. The students had calculated how much foil they needed to cover their man using surface area. Once cut, if the amount of foil was too little or too much, they had to meet with me to talk about why this happened. It was math in action!
Another great piece of the project was coming up with how much foil to cut. They had to take their total surface area and divide it by the width of the foil roll (30 cm) before cutting the foil. I made them figure this out before cutting the foil to deepen their thinking about area. They then had to talk about why they divided my 30 in their reflection. It was great to see that every student did understand why they divided by 30.
This project took longer than I thought it would, but was worth it. On the unit test, my students scored better on surface area than on volume, even with the Play-doh activity! Their biggest challenge were actually applying the foil to the tin men. Next year, I will have them apply the foil first, then tape their tin men together. They also wanted more time to decorate their tin men, but I had too much I wanted to squeeze in at the end of the year to give them an extra day. Next year I will try to build in one more day.
I can’t thank Elissa enough for this project idea OR all of the help and suggestions that she gave me via email. I love all of the fabulous math teachers in my PLN and am such a better teacher because of them! Reach out teachers and connect with each other on Twitter. Read their blogs, try their ideas. It makes teaching a blast, and the students love it. Everybody wins!
Yes, it’s FREE. It was planned by two amazing math teachers, Lisa Henry and Shelli Temple, so that math educators around the country could come together, share our favorite resources, and develop new ideas for the coming year.
The conference is called #Math Camp. (Many of the educators attending are also colleagues on Twitter.) However, it is open to all math teachers and will cover topics from middle school math to Calculus. We have been sharing resources, lesson planning, and doing book clubs together on Twitter. These are amazing teachers on the cutting edge of education and technology. What I love the most about this conference is that it is totally BY math teachers, FOR math teachers. It’s going to be an amazing four days. We even have t-shirts!
Topics such as flipping the classroom, Geogebra, standards based grading, interactive math notebooks (with foldables), real world math, project work in math class, and Exeter problem sets are currently on the program.
As a middle school math teacher, I would love for more middle school math teachers to join us! Email me if you have any questions!
When my students are excited about what they are doing in class, they are engaged. They will listen and best of all, learn. The kids were ecstatic when they saw the Play-doh. They couldn’t wait to get their hands on it! The benefits for learning were amazing. All I had to say was “Remember the Play-doh?” and they knew what to do for any volume problem.
Supplies per student:
One fun-sized Play-doh
Ruler
Plastic knife
Ruler
Instructions:
Many of my students had heard somewhere along the way that volume equaled length times width times height. So, I started by having them make a rectangular prism out of their Play-Doh.
Once it was made, I had them draw a picture of it in their Geometry Booklets. Then they measured and recorded the length, width, and height of their prism in centimeters. Next, I had them cut their prism into 1 centimeter lengths. They observed that the cross sections were squares. I had them find the area of this square. We talked about how many slices they had. So if their area was 6 centimeters squared and they had four slices how could they find the volume of the box? They quickly deduced that they needed to multiply the 6 by 4 to arrive at 24 cm cubed.
I repeated this for a cylinder and a triangular prism. We observed what the cross sections were, found the areas of our cross sections, and then found the volume. To sum it all up, we talked about how volume of a prism or cylinder is the area of the base (cross-section) times the height (number of slices).
I Speak Math 