Teaching Mrs. Ryan

Summer is in full gear and I am in slow motion here lately.  I had surgery earlier this month and am still doing recovery so I'm spending a lot of time in the house.  One of the things I wanted to do was make my lessons more discovery based this year, find creative uses for our technology, and get out of the textbook.  I've been scouring blogs, websites, twitter, and everywhere for inspiration and I've found some pretty cool things that I'm going to incorporate into class this year.  One thing I want to do is make my own pdf's that I can download into my Good Reader account for students to use in class so that they can email me work instead of the LOADS of paper I ended up with last year.  But they can't just be normal Word documents converted to pdf because that would be too easy, and I want something with a bit of pizazz.  So I started scouring more websites, viewing YouTube tutorials to create the elements of things I've seen that I like and during thi...

It is that wonderful time of the year when teachers and students alike get to take a HUGE break from school and relax.  For us, its time to sweep out the cobwebs, shove in some creativity, and of course get some much deserved R&R. I look all over for inspiration because lets face it... sometimes my brain is fried!  All the classroom management, grading, test making, lesson planning, I get excited when I'm on target and look all over the internet to find great ideas for making it even better.  There is no shame in this!  Ok... I have no shame about doing this! HA! Today, I'm going to share my awesome resources :) Teachers Pay Teachers is a great resource for finding all types of lesson plans, activities, power points, tests, Common Core Resources, and so much more.  The cool thing is this stuff is MADE BY TEACHERS, and tested out in their classrooms.  Prices for your favorite selections range from FREE on up.  You can earn credits for fre...

I have made it through to the end of my Fall Semester and my kids are approaching the end of their first semester.  Since I last wrote, my teacher returned from maternity leave and I now find myself teaching 5th grade students in Science while their teacher is out on maternity leave.  WHAT A DIFFERENCE!  This is a positively eye opening experience to be with so many different grade levels and getting the opportunity to teach two different subjects. I will be the first to admit that Science is not my best subject.  I am having to work much harder to deliver the kind of education these students deserve and along the way I am learning so much as well.  For starters, there is a HUGE difference between a 5th grade brain and a 7th grade brain.  There is a HUGE difference between a 5th grade brain and a 6th grade brain.  I think Mrs. Ryan's brain is going to explode! Science was always the subject I had to study for.  I was the student who didn't hav...

It doesn't seem like 10 weeks have already passed, but they have flown in a whirlwind of activity.  Student lesson plans, class, kids, tests, and of course there is a life outside of schools!  My 5 children, my poor neglected husband, and my poor neglected house! What I want to share though was a really great activity I did with all my students, 6th and 7th graders alike, and it was such a success.  I started out with a day I needed to fill an activity with, and I thought that a web quest about something related to math would be a great thing.  I found a great web quest already done up online.  It is HERE .   And I thought how cool.  I could do this.  The only problem was that when I got into school none of the links would open in the school.  Everything was fire walled.  So what I did was take the questions and the formats and play around at school to give the kids some links that they could actually open in the school so they co...

Well I must admit I thought we were rocking along in math class, and then I get to test day.  I realize two things: 1)  The kids don't know the material like I thought they did. 2) Since so many of them don't get it, I know the problem is me. So today I am spending time trying to find a million ways to teach my kids about positive and negative integers and about greatest common factor and least common multiple (this for my 6th graders) so that we can retest on Wednesday.  I feel bad for the kids that completely aced my test, but I'm more worried about the ones that failed dramatically.  20%, 30%, and yes I even had a 0%. It is official.  Come Monday I will be off track on the lesson plan the teacher has left for me to teach.  It is also official that my teacher will be coming back November 16th, and I need to ensure when she comes back in it was like she never left.  There is a lot of pressure for a long term substitute.  It is much more d...