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!

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.