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.