The Final Countdown: the last one?

The end is finally here. All the hard work has hopefully paid off and you are happy with your growth as a professional teacher and as a student. Have you been counting down the days? Did you ever think this day would come? Do you find yourself counting down in your regular classroom?

The end of the school year always seems to be so far away as you approach your room late in August. When the end finally does arrive, you wonder where all the time has gone and start to reminisce about the good old days with your current class. Vicki Blackwell has a personal webpage with tons of activities to celebrate the end of the school year. She also has activities to make the last days more meaningful. I especially enjoyed the tip of making t-shirts with your class. I currently make t-shirts the last week of school with my students and I love seeing them the following years.

But as the year winds down you find yourself on the celebrated last day of school. What do you do with those final hours? Beth Lewis offers many neat ideas that can be modified for any grade level to take up those final hours of school. Writing a letter to next year’s students, making a memory book, have a spelling bee, focus on next year and my favorite, clean, clean, clean are just a few she offers.

As those students walk out your door, you only can hope everything you have worked so hard to teach them will stay in their little minds. You pray they will at least pick up a book or two over summer vacation or try and practice a little math. Sometimes parents don’t realize how much their child can regress over the summer and then start the next year far behind. As students start school again in the fall, they have lost one to three months of learning. Brain Drain can happen and probably will, happen to all our students. Some tips you can offer parents are: keep math in mind, keep lots of books around and encourage reading, consider summer school and look into educational programs or camps.

When it quiets down and you begin to reflect upon your year and your empty classroom, many thoughts may rush to your mind. You may be so satisfied with how the year turned out and cry tears of happiness. You may be so happy the year is over and rejoicing you will start all over with a new class next year. You may be waiting for the end of contract time to meet up with friends to have a few celebration drinks.

But then… you may think, Why am I doing this? You may feel you have no desire to return next year. Many teachers get the blues and some never return to teaching again. If you do ever run into this situation, just remember why you became a teacher in the first place and use several motivational techniques. Also find comfort in other teachers and get support. But most important always remember… You Are Fantastic!
Good Luck in your many years to come! Jenna

You mean you want me to talk to myself?

Have you ever found yourself talking out loud as you work? Did it make you seem like you were losing your mind? Have you ever felt as if you think better when doing it out loud? Did you ever think it could be a good thing?

Thinking aloud is a great way for students to gain a higher understanding of the skills taught. But what is it? Thinking aloud is a way to get students to slow down and think about their thought processes. It helps students to understand what type of thinking is needed for a specific task.

Thinking aloud can be used in many areas of education. Specifically it can be used in math. Thinking aloud in math allows students to be engaged and walk through the problem step by step. Math think-alouds allow students to crawl into your brain and bring invisible mental processes visible. Scholastic offers several different examples of think-alouds in math. One I like to use is elapsed time. I always talk out loud when I think about how much time I have left or how much time is in a day. Scholastic also gives many examples of using math think-alouds at home, such as estimating the cost of groceries while shopping.

HotChalk, an online lesson plan page, offers a fantastic lesson plan to introduce and teach how to use math think-alouds. It can be adapted for any age although the lesson is set up for grades 6-9. One thing I found very useful is the math think-aloud prompts. It gives examples of prompts to use in order to get students to think aloud during math. Some examples of the prompts are:
· The problem says…
· What am I trying to solve?
· The important information is…
· The strategy I will use to solve this problem is…

Here is an online printable version to use with all the math think-aloud prompts.

Focus on Effectiveness has an article from a first grade teacher explaining how she incorporated math think-alouds into her classroom. She first taught them problem solving strategies in a very systematic way in order to get her students into a routine of thinking “math”. The first step is to make a picture, then act it out, make a systematic list, guess, check and revise, look for a pattern and eliminate possibilities. As they grew throughout the year, her students were taught to summarize what they were doing as they were in the process. She also had her students use the math think-aloud prompts when working through a problem. This first grade teacher shows no matter what grade you teach, math think-alouds can be effective.
In my school, we have had a huge push for think-alouds during reading. I had no idea there was think-alouds in math. I am currently working with a math interventionist to come up with activities for low math achievers to work on. I plan on using the math think-alouds not only with them but with my class.

The goal, I am finding, is create math thinkers, not just a group of bodies who can produce an answer.

They need to be asking why and how.