Place Value City Envelope Foldable

A few weeks ago I attended an amazing workshop held at our regional educational service center. The topic of the workshop was Envelope Graphic Organizers by Dinah Zike. For those of you who do not know about Dinah Zike, let me give you a quick run down. Dinah has been educator for many, many years. She started to implement the idea of using foldables to provide a kinesthetic approach to learning. This idea makes total sense, and I wish that my teachers would have incorporated this while I was in school. Dinah has a new book out covering the idea of re-using envelopes of all sizes to make foldables and graphic organizers. Since I am a huge Dinah fan, I just had to take the workshop held out the ESC.

Many of you know that I have attended several workshops and conferences during this past summer. My goal was to become more familiar and confident in the use of foldables to incorporate them into my teaching. Well...I don't know what I was so worried about! I love foldables, and my kids seem to enjoy them. After attending this conference, I immediately went to Staples and purchased several boxes of envelopes of all different sizes. I knew that it would take a while to get supplies in if I ordered them, and I wanted to show the kids what I learned!

My first objective was to help one particular student. This student is an amazing individual, who has absolutely taken to the idea of using foldables as a learning tool. Knowing that she loves arts and crafts, I was able to create an envelope foldable specific to her learning needs. One of the main topics that we are working on for this year was understanding place values, and being able to add and subtract up to six or seven places. The first thing that I needed to address was understanding the different place values. This is where the workshop that I attended and Pinterest came in handy.

While looking up ideas to help learn place values, I came across this image on Pinterest. It is a foldable  that stands alone, which makes it perfect to sit on a desk or table. Each house has three place values. The green house has a place for the ones, tens, and hundreds. The yellow has a place for thousands, ten-thousands, hundred-thousands. This continues up through the millions and billions. The orange fence holds the decimal place values: tenths, hundredths, and thousandths. It was a perfect starting point for my idea.

https://episd.org/_departments/Ed_media-prt-prod/docs/math_elem/house%20place%20value.jpg

Now, I didn't need to have the billions house or the thousandths place in the fenced area. I modified this "city" to be exactly what I needed. Our city had three houses and two fenced in areas. It was perfect for what we were going to work on, plus it allowed some growth for that student.

Dinah Zike created an envelope foldable that created a workstation that stood up, and had a pocket to hold things. I was thinking that I could create the city to sit on the part of the envelope that stood up. The envelope could hold another smaller envelope that had a bunch of numbers 0-9 inside. There would be enough numbers to create any number that she could think of. We could lay the city down, place the numbers inside of the columns, and the student would be able to identify the place values for each of the numbers. There would also be room to keep any worksheets or other notes that we take in the future to keep everything together. It was portable, colorful, and useful.

Place Value City standing up. This would be the image from the student's viewpoint.

This is the back side or cover of the Place Value City. I even included an
establishment date and a founder just like a regular city would have.

This showcases the use of the numbers inside of the
columns for each place value.
I think this is best part of the city!

The envelope holding the numbers goes inside of the bottom
part of the brown envelope.

 This is one of my favorite projects so far this year. I have reached out to a few of my elementary teaching friends, and they are interested in having their students construct place value cities to help with their understandings of place values. I look forward to seeing how younger students make and use this idea as a learning tool! I hope you enjoyed this idea, and please use in your own classrooms!

Samsung Chromebook Test Drive (Day 0): In a High School Math Classroom

This past week I went to San Antonio, Texas to a professional development conference put on by CSCOPE. CSCOPE is tied directly to the development of Texas education and consistent curriculum. It was a great trip, and I continued to learn new tips and strategies to use inside my classroom this coming up year. My summer of professional development and training has come to an end, and I am looking forward to preparing for the upcoming school year!

When I came home, I had a wonderful surprise waiting for me. A Samsung Chromebook! What was even better about it was that the school provided it to me. I had talked to my school administrator on the way San Antonio about using technology in the classrooms. Several of my state standards are changing in the near future to require me to incorporate more technology into the classroom, and I wanted a head start. He mentioned the school district is working on equipping every teacher with a classroom set of Chromebook computers! I was excited by that news, in itself. Honestly, no more having to reserve a computer lab? Who wouldn't love being able to use portable computers inside their classroom?

The one thing that he mentioned is that some of the teachers would be "test driving" these Chromebook computers in their classroom. I didn't think that I would be considered since I was new to the campus, and am only in my second year of teaching. I was pleasantly surprised to come home to this gem sitting in my closet. I will be starting out with just one teacher computer for this first semester. I will need to learn how I can incorporate it into the classroom, and then I will be able to share my experiences with other teachers in the Spring. I have started to look online at all of the capabilities of this computer, and I am excited to start my test drive. I am waiting on my login information from my technology department, but I have a game plan as to what I need to use to prepare myself for this coming up semester. Stay tuned as I share my comments on using this new technology in a high school math classroom.

Music and Math: Increasing Student Engagement

Incorporating music and math is fun way to engage students, as well as make the class periods exciting. Music Notes is a company that has produced many math videos and songs dedicated to teaching students math concepts through the genre of rap music. What students these days will not be interested in a fun song with a great beat? Music Notes has created a wide range of math ability songs matching the concepts learned by elementary school level children all the way through high school level Geometry students.

This past week, I attended a conference in San Antonio. While at CAMT (Conference for the Advancement of Mathematics Teachers), I purchased a DVD showing music videos focusing on Geometry concepts at the high school level. The album/video is actually named "Deometry," which I found to be fun and catchy! The artist in the videos is a gentleman named Mr. D, s

o it makes sense that it is not just geometry by Deometry! I am excited to incorporate these songs into my classroom as I introduce these specific new concepts. With titles like: Pythag's Formula, Talkin' Triangles, Holla SAS or SSS, and On My Plane, who couldn't resist listening to and enjoying these songs!

I have incorporated music and math into my previous classrooms, and they were a great way to engage the students. However, I always thought there was a little something missing. Something that can go along with the video to help solidify the ideas that were presented strictly in the video. Music Notes has filled that void for me. Not only have the created these awesome songs and videos, but they have developed a workbook that accompanies each album/DVD! The workbook has several 1-3 question activities that can be used in conjunction with the videos. Not only are the students able to hear the information in a fun format, but they are able to immediately practice the material that is tied directly to what they just listened to!

Now, there is one more piece of fun information that I have not shared with you. When I listen to rap music, I have a hard time learning the words to the song because...well...they are just too fast for me. Maybe that is showing my age, but Music Notes has a way to help me learn the lyrics, as well as the students. Online at their website: www.musicnotesonline.com they have actually included all of the lyrics to their songs for you to print out. This can be done for the students, and any struggling teachers, to learn the words of the song. I don't know how many times I am caught singing a song with the wrong lyrics! So, I'm thinking classroom karaoke is in store for my class next year!