Mathsational

I followed TMC15 virtually and read about Glenn Waddell's session on giving his students high fives every day for a year.  So I decided to take on the challenge this past school year.  I am proud to say that I was successful.  I didn't miss a single day.  This was a big change for me.  I never made it into the hallway as often as I would have liked before.  Most of the time, I was doing a quick clean-up of my room between classes.  This included putting away supplies from one class and taking out the supplies needed for the next class.  This was actually the biggest hurdle that I had to overcome to be able to complete the challenge successfully. I came up with a system where I used masking tape to split up a table by class and set out all the supplies for the day.  I trained my students to pick up and put back their own supplies from this table at the start and end of class each day.  The only other minor thing that I had to give ...

Classroom culture seems pretty hit or miss for me.  My kids are typically respectful of me, but some years I have kids that are wonderful to each other and other years they are a bit mean to each other.  One of my goals this year will be to try to get my students to be kind. I have really liked Love and Logic for this.  I have never gone through the official training for this, but would like to.  As with anything, I really like some of the ideas and sort of hate others, so I only use the pieces that I love. Here is a pdf on " How to Create a Love and Logic Classroom ."  I love their classroom rules of  "Feel free to do anything that does not cause a problem for anyone."   and  "If you find yourself with a problem, you may solve it by any means which does not cause a problem for anyone else in the world." This would include the student, the teacher, and any other people in the room.  I think these could easily be your...