Teaching Mrs. Ryan

     It has been a busy time since I last posted about my NCTM conference.  Since then I've gotten my students hooked on Mathletics and we have successfully added Mathletics to our curriculum arsenal.  Currently I am using Mathletics as a warm-up for students in the classroom, but we are also using activities and lesson plans to get students engaged in learning in a whole new way.   Just after getting Mathletics on board in school, I headed to another conference.  This time I went to a Differentiating Instruction conference held by SDE .        Honestly, I wasn't really excited about this conference.  (1) During my graduate program and even during undergraduate studies, that is all you are taught.  You are taught to differentiate instruction and how it needs to happen, ways it needs to happen, and why it needs to happen.  DI, DI, DI... do it is what that needed to stand for.  (2) My collea...

To say the last 3 weeks have been informative would be an understatement.  I can say without hesitation that I have learned more from my kids than they've learned from me.  I wish I could say it has been all sunshine and roses, but that is definitely not the case.  In fact, it has been hard, exhaustive work, but I sure do love it! While I've been working on differentiating my instruction by doing different activities, modeling, visuals, and group work, my main focus has been about classroom management.  The first week the students seemed to be wary of me since I was a new grown up, but by the end of the week, they were definitely testing the waters to see what they could get away with. So, when I began my second week, I began to get a bit more strict about what was going on in the classroom. One of the things I did was grade the work we did in class together.  This helped me for a variety of reasons.  The first thing was that I could tell when I was tea...