It's time for a HUGE Thank You!

It's 11:49 on New Year's Eve and the ball is just about to drop in Times Square. I quickly take out my phone (getting it ready to send out all of those very important "Happy New Years" texts to family and friends) and happen to fall upon an email from Donors Choose telling me that one of my larger projects has been funded by one person.  I'm in awe and amazed...and then the ball drops and it's 2016.

I feel like this was a perfect way to start out a new year.  A perfect way to start a fresh and give thanks for all I've received in the past year.  This past year has been a pretty good one-both personally and professionally.

Professionally-it's had a lot of changes and I'm pretty excited about most of them.

This past year, I switched jobs and with switching jobs meant a lot of new things-new grade levels, new subjects to teach (MATH), new ways to do things.  My life had been so focused on literacy and the younger grades the past 8 years that I had almost NO materials for the older grades or MATH.  So, I turned to Donors Choose.  Since accepting my new job, I've written a lot of projects and they've ALL been funded.  I've received amazing materials including-an ipad, a chromebook, a mouse, charging station, folders, math workbooks, paper, glue, printer ink, laminating sleeves, many different math games, math manipulatives, legos and numerous other things I can't even recall at this moment.

I want to take a moment and thank these people (most of whom I don't even know) for helping me create a safe space for my students where I have everything I could ever need (and more) to help them be successful. For helping me be able to try different things to teach topics I've never taught before (including using legos-I'm super excited to start that when school starts back up!).  For helping me gain simple materials like paper and glue that makes it so we teachers can spend all of our time focusing on the important tasks at hand (teaching the little humans of the world).  For making my students excited to learn and explore the world around them.  For being so generous that it actually blows my mind.  THANK YOU!

Celebrating Life's Little Victories

When I taught first grade, there were "ah-ha! moments" daily and sometimes more then once daily.  It was exciting and exhilarating and my students and I celebrated these moments whenever they happened.  My classroom was and continues to be a place of acceptance for where we are in this exact moment, and a place of celebrating how far we have gone (in all aspects of life).

However, this year, I have come to remember how much smaller these "ah-ha moments" or "little victories" are in the world of special education.  My students don't always have daily "ah-ha moments" and sometimes the saying of "one step forward, two steps back" is even more appropriate.  But, when these "little victories" occur, they are so much more special and meaningful!  Sometimes after days of working on a specific topic, these "ah-ha moments" come out of nowhere and make all of the "two steps back", so worth it.  The other day I was in a 4th grade math class where we had been working on some pretty challenging multiplication concepts and 2 of my students had been very frustrated with this work.  However, on this day one of my students turned to the other and said

"We both have brains.  We can do this!"

 This was the first real "YES" moment that I had this year and it was amazing.  I forgot how important these moments are to teachers (and to me) and this was a great one.  It wasn't just an "ah-ha moment" for one student, but it was a moment where these students took ownership of their own learning and had confidence in what they were completing.  This confidence doesn't come easy to my students and so watching them gain confidence in their learning was a great way to spend my morning.  We stopped doing math and celebrated these statements and how empowering they were.  It was an amazing moment. 

Just like Kid President says:

My students are doing this for each other and helping to empower each other to take ownership of their own learning and I look forward to watching this continue to occur! 

A Year of Math...

This year, a lot has changed in my teaching career and I'm very excited about the new change.  I've gone from being a first grade teacher with my main focus being on reading intervention into a 2nd-5th grade special educator (at the same school) with my main focus being math.  This is a learning curve and a welcome challenge for me, as I'm much more comfortable with reading, but sometimes stepping outside of your comfort zone and bubble is just what is needed.  I'm learning and figuring out all new ways to teach math to students with special needs and taking it all one step at a time.  Things are much different this year then they have been for the past 8 years in many ways, but this change and challenge was just what I needed.

Through the help of donors choose, I'm quickly increasing my library of math supplies and creating a welcoming math classroom for my students.  I work with four different amazing teachers every day and am constantly creating and modifying new materials for my students and teachers to use to help my students become the best mathematicians they can be.

One such product that I've created are my Story Problem Rubrics.  We use Investigations as our main math curriculum in grades 1-4 and so there are a lot of story problems (or word problems) that the students are constantly working on.  We've tried to remind the students to always show their work, but it doesn't always stick with them.  So, I've created these rubrics to help all of our students remember all of the steps that they need to include when working on story problems.  Some of the students have them laminated in their folders or math bins so that they can pull them out and use them whenever they are working on story problems.  This has really helped our students know what is expected of them and has helped them be able to remember to show all of their work (this is a huge part of our curriculum and sometimes hard for my students with special needs).  Feel free to check them out at my teachers pay teachers page.

Reflecting Back...

Now that the school year is over and summer is upon us (and it's an amazing one so far), I'm reflecting back on some of the amazing things that occurred this past year in first grade.  This past year I went from having 1 i-pad in my classroom to having 7.  It still isn't the 2:1 i-pad program that we envision for our first grade classrooms, but we're moving in the right direction!  By having this many i-pads in my classroom, I've been able to do so much more technology wise with my students.  

One of the programs that I've been able to use with my students so much this year is Reflex Math.  It is a great program, where the students practice math fluency facts based on their grade and ability level.  My students were obsessed with it this year and begged me to play it more often!  I loved being able to watch them become more confident in both their math and technology skills through the use of this program!  

However, only having 7 i-pads (usually 6 as there always happened to be one that needed to be charged), it was a challenge to make sure all of my students were able to reach the recommended amount of time for the program so that we would be able to see results.  I was able to help my students be able to see more results by creating a specific Reflex Math Schedule.  There was a morning and an afternoon schedule.  The morning schedule allowed all 6 i-pads to be used daily to make sure ALL students were able to have access to reflex math (and play until their light turned from red to green) twice a week.  6 students a day would unpack in the morning and then play reflex math during morning work time.  Then there also was an afternoon schedule.  This schedule was different.  This schedule was a "bonus" schedule for students whom needed extra time with their math facts.  These students got 2-3 "bonus" Reflex Math sessions a week where they would be able to play only AFTER they completed their daily math work.  These schedules helped my students know when they each were able to play the game, helped me be able to know whom already had played that week and whom also needed more time, and also helped me figure out who wasn't playing at home (and needed extra time at school with the program).  See examples of the schedule here.

As the students continued to use this program, I noticed that they weren't challenging themselves with the program as much as I believed that they could.  So, in order to help my student challenge themselves more I created a place cart.  This chart helped my students see what place they were in against their classmates with the goal being to move up throughout the rest of the school year.  I don't normally like to add competition into the classroom, but this really helped my students.  The sense of competition helped them realize that they needed to push themselves a little more and so I started seeing their scores improving and my students were so excited to see what place they were in-it goes up to the 21st place (I updated it every other day on a laminated chart).    

Feel free to grab this chart from my TPT store.  

Turning over a New Teaching Leaf!

At the end of this school year, I finished my 9th year teaching and my 7th year teaching 1st grade.  It is still mind blowing to me that I am old enough to have been teaching for 9 years.  I am in a place (physically-being in Baltimore and professionally-teaching at a Urban Charter School) in my life that I never thought I would be in, and I'm loving every second of it.  There are ups and downs of course, but there are definitely more ups then downs.  I never thought I'd leave Long Island to teach and here I am finding myself living in Baltimore for the past 8 years-a city that I have come to love and call my second "home".

Dressed up like we're 100
years old for the 100th
day of school

I have been so lucky to teach 1st grade for the past 7 years with a great team.  They've gone along with all of my crazy ideas and we have created a strong curriculum that has helped us empower our students to become strong readers whom love school and learning! 1st grade is near and dear to my heart and has been one of the best teaching experiences I have ever had.  I love the excitement and joy that the little ones bring into my classroom every day and the look of pure awe they show when they accomplish something that they thought was impossible just a day ago!  

However, throughout this year I have felt that it was time for a new challenge in my teaching career.  I spent a good portion of my out of classroom time, thinking of what I would like this new challenge to include and the 2 main things that have continued to come up were-special education and educational technology.  I've always had a passion for special education (being dual certified in elementary and special education I always teach an inclusive group of first graders), and felt that it was time to challenge myself in that direction, while still continuing to pursue my educational technology passions.  

So, next year I will be changing positions at my school.  I am very excited about this new change and challenge, but am also very nervous.  I will be leaving the safety net of my amazing team to challenge myself and will be joining a new team that I am very excited to work with.  I am excited to learn new things and push myself in a new direction.  I'm excited to be able to use my passion for technology with a new group of students and see how that passion can help my students grow and thrive towards their goals.  I'm nervous about all of the unknowns that I of course can't control and the fact that I will be trying something new.  I'm nervous of a different type of work, and the fact that I will need to re-teach myself how to balance my life.  But, the excitement continues to outweigh the nervousness and so...it's time and I look forward to whatever comes next. :)    

I look forward to this new challenge and all that will come with it!  Here are to new changes and challenges and all of the possibilities that will come with it!!

Arts Integration in First Grade!

I think it's time that I finally share some of the awesome things we've been doing in first grade this year!  There is no better way to do this, then to share a video we made for a presentation we did back in December (I know...a little late in sharing here...).  This year with our big push for more Arts Integration, we decided to add a lot of smaller things into our weekly lessons to include AI.  Here in this video, you can see some of the exciting things that we have done so far this year to include AI in first grade!! Enjoy!!!  

Building a House for the 4th Little Piggy!

This summer when we worked on re-writing the first grade curriculum we decided that we needed to challenge our students more to think "outside of the box".  With the shift to Common Core, we needed to start pushing our first graders to think in more complex ways, be more creative and innovative students and learners.  
SO, this past 3-day week we spent the WHOLE week working on a very special unit where the students were challenged to create a house for the fourth little pig! The students were super pumped because we stopped all other instruction for this-no reading, math or science besides all of the amazing skills that were lumped into this unit!  We read numerous versions of the 3 little pigs, discussed different houses and what important parts of a house are, created towers... and then finally the students created a "house" out of random recycled materials with a partner.  When they were done...we tested them.  The students and I tried to "blow" the houses down and then the pairs had to decide what they could have done differently to "fix" their broken houses.  It was Awesome!!!!  Watching the students work together, share ideas, brainstorm and create something-all while being completely engaged in a task that included so many subjects in it-was a thrill to watch!!!  Looking forward to more learning like this in first grade!!!!