Teaching Mrs. Ryan

      Well, wouldn't you know it that I would go crazy shopping and planning and guess what?  I will once again be teaching 5th grade math!  You know what though, I am definitely okay with it.  I LOVE MATH.  One of the things I've also learned in my short 7 years of teaching is that it doesn't matter how many times you've taught a subject, every year is different.  There are new ideas, thoughts, activities, and a blend of what you know that works great mixed in.       This summer I clocked something like 40 hours of professional development.  It was my favorite kind too!  You know, where you get to pick what you learn about instead of the district mandates.  For years I have wanted to institute a Wonder Shelf in my classroom.  Have you heard of one of these?  It is essentially a place with mini-projects and activities for students to work on when they have mastered your current standard, or even if they ar...

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...

I hate to call what we are doing a semester since it is only a month long, but WOW the workload is a semester's worth.  This month I am taking an educational psychology course along with an elementary literacy course that focuses on assessments as well as teaching.  Both are very interesting so I can say at least while I'm being overwhelmed with a lot of work, it isn't boring work!  The biggest difference I'm seeing with this month's workload versus last month's work load is the amount of papers I have to write.  There are an ENORMOUS amount of papers.  One of my paper's that I must write this first week focuses on Piaget;s theories of cognitive development.  I've found a little YouTube video that discusses what they are so you can get an idea of what I'm learning about at this stage in the program. I missed the first psychology in class lecture due to my daughter having to go to the hospital, and now I am feeling like I'm flying blind on my...