Tag, You're It!

  Bonnie tagged me over at Living a Wonderful Life. Let's just jump right in, shall we?

1. You must post the rules.
2. Post 12 fun facts about yourself on the blog post.
3. Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post, and then create 12 new questions for the people you tagged.
4. Tag 12 people and link them on your post.
5. Let them know you've tagged them!

12 Fun Facts About Me

1. A fellow teacher introduced me to her brother-in-law and 4 years later we are still dating and very happy!

2. My chihuahua is quite the little chunky monkey and she snorts and impolitely stares.

3. I got my nails done and I got a nude color. It makes my fingers look long.

4. I have short toddler like fingers so I like things that make my fingers long.

5. I snubbed Dave Matthews at my mailbox as he drove by honking.

6. My friends and I collect super gaudy rings and wear them as a competition when we get together. My most recent purchase was a spool of thread ring. 

7. My dad was a tour guide at Monticello.

8. Vegas is one of my favorite places to go. I would tell you about it, but it's kind of against code.

9. I make Paula Deen's Lemon Blossoms for pretty much any event that I go to. They are delicious and people go crazy over them. Here is the recipe. 

10. I went to the principal's office two times in my school lifetime. Once for flushing a mean boy's sandwich down the toiled and once for setting the principal's hair on fire.

11. I am a total foodie and love watching the Food Network. I watch the Barefoot Contessa every night when I am going to bed. Don't ask, something about that pleasantly plump woman soothes me to slumber.

12. I have eaten breakfast in the dining room in the White House. 

Now to Bonnie's questions...

1. What state do you live in?
   I live in Arizona, but I grew up in Virginia.
2. Do you collect anything?
   I collect Jadeite dishes (vintage jade green dishes).
3. What is your favorite color?
   Mmmm, I don't think I have a favorite! I like all colors!
4. Do you do anything work related on the weekend?
   Ummm, haha, YES! Every weekend... I totally admire teachers that make sure that doesn't happen.
5. What is your favorite food?
   I love Mexican food. I also love arugula salad with lemon vinaigrette, parmesan cheese, and pine nuts. I seriously could eat many many bowls. I go through a bag of arugula in like 2 days by myself.
6. How long is your commute to work?
   I am really lucky and it takes me about 10-15 minutes to get to work depending on traffic.
7. If you won the lottery, what would you do with the money?
   Pay off all my debt, go back to school to get my masters, and donate to Share Our Strength.
8. How do you spend your time when you're relaxing?
   Wearing stretchy pants, drinking wine, and watching a good movie on Netflix!
9. How many weddings have you been in?
   Oh my, let's see. Green dress, purple dress, blue dress, brown dress... 4? I feel like there is one more though.
10. What is your favorite place you've visited?
    I am so fortunate to have parents that gave our family opportunities to go to many amazing places. I have been to Europe, Scotland, Australia, but I have to say I think my favorite place is Disney World. :-)
11. If you weren't a teacher, what would you be?
    I would be a baker for sure. I love cooking and always am baking if I am stressed out. My co-workers always know if work is stressing me out because I will bring them goodies the next day from my night of de-stressing.
12. Kids...do you have any?  How many do you have/want?
    I don't have any kids, just 2 chihuahuas. I would love to have 2 kids one day. :-) 
    Twelve Questions for My Taggees
    1. What has been the most memorable lesson you have taught?
    2. What's a scent that triggers a memory for you?
    3. What's your favorite movie?
    4. What's do you usually bring for lunch to school?
    5. Do you prefer student led conferences or traditional parent teacher conferences?
    6. Do you drink Starbucks? What's your usual order?
    7. What's your cell phone ring tone?
    8. How often do you check your blogs that you follow?
    9. What's your favorite recipe you like to bring to parties?
    10. What's a TV show that you loved growing up?
    11. Target or Walmart?
    12. How many students do you have in your class?

Here are the 12 people who I am tagging! Sorry if you have already been tagged. 

1. Stephanie at Teaching in Room 6

2. The Polka Dot Owl

3. Janaye at Tales of Frogs and Cupcakes

4. Tales of a Fifth Grade Teacher

5. Runde's Room

6. Jennifer at Rowdy in First Grade

7. Deborah at Multi-Grade Matters

8. Sherrie at Middle School Math Rules!

9. Lisa at mrs. tilmon says...

10. Jordan at Life is Better Messy Anyway

11. Liz at Fast Times of a Middle School Math Teacher

12. Kim at Finding JOY in 6th Grade

Gee Golly, Geometry!

I haven't written on my blog in quite a while! I've missed so much!
We finally wrapped up our geometry unit so here are a few more things that we did. Here's a few entries that we made in our math notebooks. I love our math notebooks! Usually I let them create their own pages, but with geometry I felt like I had to type up a lot of the entries to speed the process up and make sure they had accurate angles and lines. 

Find electronic copy here.

OK, well these are kind of hard to see.  Not my best photographic work! Here are some 3-D castles that we built to wrap up our geometry unit. I had them plan it out first...

Then we turned our classroom into a brief construction zone. Paper everywhere! But it was totally worth it. They already had 3-D nets in their math notebooks so they traced them onto white paper and then cut and taped into the shapes. I think my pictures can represent how my classroom looked for the day. Warning, the shocking mess may result in unpleasant side effects... Haha! I just noticed all the money lying around on the tables! You can tell I was definitely giving positive reinforcement to the ones who were cutting the whole time.

 But then here's how they turned out...

SO cute! And then (whew, almost done!) they had to fill out the form because quite a few of them didn't finish their castles so they had to take them home. I had to hold them accountable although I suppose some of them could've filled this out without finishing their castles, but I like to think they all slaved over their castles and made many a teeny weeny 3-D shapes.

Hopefully you all can build the castles in your classrooms! They really were fun and a great wrap up for the unit. Have a fantastic Monday tomorrow!

Geometry Robots

  Happy weekend!
Don't you just love the weekend?? OK, yeah, I know I know, the one of the main reasons that we all love it is because we don't have to go into school. We all know we still "work" over the weekend, come on, admit it... I went into school yesterday for a few hours to catch up. Here's what I did:

• Cleaned out my top 3 desk drawers (the bottom two are a TOTAL MESS, that's going to take a whole day in itself!). I found a fork in my desk drawer (weird), a plethora of small germy toys, and a TON of random markers that don't even work anymore. How many non-working markers does one need? Apparently 46...
• Made copies of all the bell work and homework for the week
• Finished copying all of the multiplication facts timed tests for my RtI group
• Filed away some teaching blog goodie finds
• Scanned a ton of stuff! I try to keep a classroom website where if any of my students have missing assignments they can just go and print whatever they are missing, but sometimes I get a wee bit behind. Oopsies!

Hmmm, when I type it all out it doesn't seem like I did that much... Do you ever feel like you did a lot, but not that much at the same time?

OK, back to the task at hand after my random ranting. I had my RtI group make these Geometry Robots while I met with small groups. This could easily be done as a whole group activity and works as a great assessment tool. This was one of those total spur of the moment teaching ideas, so if you add a little pizazz to your version let me know what you do! I typed it up so that you could print two to a page, but you could easily slide this under your document camera if you don't want to waste paper. Click on the picture for the Google Doc.

Here are some of my student examples. Bear in mind, that this is my RtI group so these are the students who struggle in math a little more than the others.

Not really sure why this Geometry Robot has a nice little blinged out necklace on it, but it does add a little certain something, haha!

I hope you'll be able to use these in your classrooms. Let me know how they turn out if you do. It was a cute project. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Geometry Anchor Charts

 We are wrapping our geometry unit in math class right now. I love teaching geometry; it's definitely one of my favorites. Thanks to Pinterest and the fabulous world of blogging, my love for geometry knows no bounds! I decided to get a little eloquent with that one, you like?  For the next few blog entries, I'm going to do a little Geometry Series! Woohoo! I know you all are excited, try to contain it... ;-)

Here's a few anchor charts that I whipped up so far.

This tacks on to the bottom of the other one.

I am pretty sure I saw this one on Pinterest and copied it. I can't remember though to give the credit!

Tomorrow's FRIDAY! Is it just me or has this week been super long? I hope everyone has a great Friday and a fantastic weekend!

A Day In My Shoes

  I'm linking up with Adventures of a 6th Grade Teacher and Miss Klohn's linky party of A Day In My Shoes. It has been so fascinating reading what everyone goes through in their daily lives. I thought my days were busy... mine are nothing compared to some others I have read!

My Wonderful Wednesday

6:04 AM: First alarm goes off, hit the snooze button

6:14 AM: Second alarm goes off, I finally drag myself out of bed

6:14-7:15 AM: Shower, coffee, let the chihuahuas take a romp in the yard, make breakfast (or more like defrost a VitaTop), and grab my lunch I made the night before

7:15-7:30 AM: Drive to work while trying to justify why I don't need a Starbucks... but I really really wanted one!

7:30 - 7:32 AM: I realize I should've gotten a Starbucks as I stare in space sitting in my desk chair.

7:32-8:35 AM: Make copies, talk about possibly doing student led conferences with a coworker, reply to emails, make a parent phone call, update agenda board.

8:35-9:42: The kids come and we greet with shaking hands at the door. Math with my homeroom class and we got through part of classifying quadrilaterals based off of their attributes (fun!).

9:42 - 10:32: Art, there's a substitute teacher.

10:06: Call from substitute teacher in Art informing that my students are behaving badly. I go in and look around scowling. Not happy! Not happy! Noise has quieted dramatically; Art class commences.

10:32 - 11:45: Finish classifying polygons and work through finding missing angles in quadrilaterals on white boards.

11:45 - 12:10: Switch classes, other class does bellwork

12:10-12:30: Recess duty. Hooligans from the Art Class debacle owe me recess.

12:37-12:50: Eat lunch at lightning speed!

12:50 - 1:53: Continue math

1:55-2:45: RtI ~ I meet with small groups and the rest of the kids finish their Geometry Robots!

2:45-3:25: Finish math

3:25-3:35: Read Sir Cumference and the Knight of Angleland for the last 10 minutes of class.

3:35 - Dismissal

3:40-4:45 - After school tutoring with my 5 little lovelies. A little snack and math never hurt anyone! One of my kiddos past her 9's on her timed test, woohoo! A parent picked up their kid 15 minutes late so I had to wait.

4:45-5:30 - Get ready for tomorrow's sub (I have a 2 hr pull out tomorrow) and make a few parent phone calls. It's kind of awkward to tell a parent that their student did an impromptu cartwheel in the middle of your RtI class today...

6:00 - Home!

6:30 - Dinner... Kashi Pesto Pizza. Didn't feel like cooking!

7:00 - 10:00: A little combo of pinning, facebooking, blogging, grading, planning, and TiVo catching up.

10:00 - Bed time! Ready to start tomorrow!

Better Late Than Never!

I'm a little late on the ball here, but I wanted to link up with Farley's Currently January at Oh' Boy 4th Grade.

This first week back from break has been crazy busy! Hopefully next week I will be able to post some of my activities I have been doing with our Geometry unit for the next week or so. Have a great Friday!

Versatile Blogger Award

Thanks to Michelle over at Making It As A Middle School Teacher for awarding me the Versatile Blogger Award!

Here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you with a link back to them. 
2. Tell 7 things about yourself.
3. Pass this on to 15 newly discovered blogs and let them know they have received an award!

Here are 15 blogs who I am giving the Versatile Blogger Award to:

1. Clutter Free Classroom
2. Diary of a 5th Grade Teacher
3. Dots-n-Spots
4. Fast Times of a Middle School Teacher
5. Finding JOY in 6th Grade
6. Juice Boxes and Crayolas
7. Life is Better Messy Anyway!
8. Middle School Math Rules! 
9. Oh' Boy 4th Grade
10. Tales of Frogs and Cupcakes
11. Teaching in Room 6
12. Runde's Room
13. The Teaching Bank
14. What the Teacher Wants!
15. Multi-Grade Matters: Ideas for a Split Class

Multiplication and Division Vocabulary Cards

  Happy New Year! First post of 2012... let's celebrate with some vocabulary, shall we?

These cards focus on multiplication and division concepts. In a previous post, I professed my love for the Frayer Model and how I have the students create these for each major concept we go over.
I also print these cards out in color, glue to black card stock, laminate, and stick a magnet on the back. I put the cards we are currently going over on our "Word Wall" (aka a blank white board with a special name) and when we are done with that specific unit, they get pushed back to the "Word Vault" in a separate place in the room for future references. Enjoy the freebie!