AMLE travels for me, students show great perseverance.

What a long strange trip it's been...

I left Sunday afternoon to travel to Philadelphia with my coworkers Joy and Amy to attend the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) annual conference. What an awesome few days of professional development and taking in the sights and sounds of a great city too. I will share out some of the resources, but I don't want to break the internet by posting all of them on this blog. I did tweet out every session I went to. Another resource would be to search the hashtag #AMLE2017.

The sessions I focused on related to project based learning in math (shocker), middle school transitions, and supporting active learners. I'm really needing to introduce brain breaks more during class and I'm now using the site http://www.motivatingthemiddle.org/ to do so. As the presenter said (and she was awesome) "if the butt goes numb, the brain goes dumb". Yesterday we did an activity called "Egg, chicken, cow, human" and the kids loved it!

One of my favorite graphics from the project based strands is below:



I also really enjoyed the Tarrant Presentation about the intersection of project based learning & proficiency based learning. Their whole presentation can be found here.

Joy, Amy and I also took some time to explore Philadelphia. What a great an interesting city! We posted as many pictures as we could to the Sterling Instagram account to keep the kids in the loop as much as possible while we were gone.

The students did an amazing job working for the 3 days I was out. I had kids emailing me pictures of their work daily, and spent a lot time checking in and answer questions via email as well. It's been great to read their blogs this week and see how much learning took place.

Next week 6th graders will begin presenting their dance planning projects to the other teachers on the team while also beginning the early work of designing their new dream rooms. 5th graders will be wrapping up our decimal and place value unit by doing some shopping.

Wrapping Up 1st Project, starting next round!

It's been too long blog! My students have been more active on their blogs than I have been. My 6th graders have finished their dance planning project and I could not be happier with the results. They all were invested in the process and the math learning looks to have come through as well. I decided to give them the same end of unit assessment that they would have taken in previous years so I can have some cross year comparison within my classes, but also it's the same assessment the other teams in the building give too. So I'll also have some current year cross team data to look at as well. Here's a photo of the 6th grade design teams practicing their presentations before presenting to teachers in the next few weeks.

I decided to not follow through on the 5th grade project I had planned. It was too cumbersome to pull off early in the year and I really needed to have the community connections established before seeing it out. I did like the premise of the project and hope to attempt it again next year. While doing more direct instruction I was able to keep working on group norms for the classes and I've noticed that has really paid off. The 5th graders are really working well in their design teams, and even when we switched to new groups this week it didn't take a lot of work. The group is going to start doing decimal and place value work. I'm going to introduce a mini-project for that and I'm still researching what to do. Here are some more photos I've taken over the past couple of weeks as I've not been blogging featuring some looks at our new (temporary) digs while our space is being renovated. Enjoy!

I'm excited from here to be heading to Philadelphia on Sunday for the AMLE national conference (American Middle Level Educators). I plan on going to the Project Based Learning sessions while also looking at some bigger picture items for the team and my classroom practices in general. My goal is to do a blog post from AMLE specific to the conference and feature some resources. I'll also be tweeting out (@jwbvt).

Rolling along on our projects and I attend a PLP Fair

This week was a productive week both in and outside of the classroom.

6th grade students spent the early part of the week continuing to explore fractions. We did a series of exit tasks surrounding the different fraction operations. I've been compiling those to determine the individual supports I can offer for those needing some more work. The end of the week for them brought project work time. I'm continuing to be blown away by the level of work and team work that these kids show. Their scale models are really coming together! Wednesday I went to the front office and brought back to the classroom one of the real construction drawings being used during our building renovation. Kids really looked at that with a careful eye before heading back to their individual drawings.

This photo is when the kids called down Joe Carr, who oversees the dances. They wanted to know where they could place items, how many kids came, etc. He was a good sport!

In 5th grade, students are working really hard for learning the formula for area of rectangle. We finally got to where we understand that area of a rectangle is length times width! From there, we began to extend that to finding the surface area of a 3-dimensional shape. Students worked together exploring how to create a formula for that as well.

Every Friday is a reflection day, I created a 5 question reflection guide with sentence starters for kids to think about as the blogged. We are using kidblog to do our writing. Student blogs can be viewed at the following link: https://kidblog.org/class/mr-baileys-math/posts

Starting to measure up

This week was a great week for PBL. We started the week by double blocking our classes to support the ELA group doing a reading assessment. This provided us with a great opportunity to go and get some measuring done to start our projects. 6th grade measured the "dining room" because they need to provide a scale drawing as part of the project. Here are some pics of that experience:

We were lucky enough to have our curriculum coaches in the room as well to see the process! (Twitter: @cvulearns).

In 5th grade we also needed to due some measuring to get the base area of our geodesic dome. We happen to have an octagonal sandbox! So we went out (and braved the heat) to measure it. Students did a great job making labeled sketches as well after taking their measurements. Here are a few photos of that:

We ended the week with a reflection. Student "design teams" updated their google sites with two items: 1- a good photo piece of evidence of the work they did this week and 2- the group checklist. 6th graders got check lists filled out and 5th graders got a blank one to set goals as a group for next week.

6th graders then went on to reflect individually on their "Kidblog" accounts. I'm so grateful that Bonnie Birdsall (Twitter: @bonniebird), our Digital Learning Leader, and her support in getting these accounts setup. My long term hope is a quick and easy way for kids to embed those posts on their design team sites.

Professionally I also was involved with presenting a proposal to ISTE about my work with Protean and how that supports our Personalized Learning. I'm nervous and hopeful that it will be accepted. I will find out in December.

Early days of the 1st projects

This week both classes kicked off their projects and it was so exciting! My own level of interest was increased as well by the enthusiasm of the students. 6th graders were very excited to learn that they would be presenting their designs to see who could decorate the Sterling sponsored dance in January. 5th graders were equally excited to hear they would have the opportunity to propose a geodesic dome greenhouse to be built at the school to support the community gardens.

Professionally I was also able to participate in a great Twitter chat on Thursday. The focus was Project Based Learning. It was the #vted chat that takes place every other Thursday during the school year and the topics change each time. Obviously I was interested in the PBL topic. Here's a link to the hashtag on Twitter. I made a lot of great connections, shared some success and struggles about the journey so far and gathered some more resources to use in the days and months ahead.

Lastly, I leave you with two media items. The first is a photo of student work for the week and the second is something I'm super proud of. During a 6th grade class, students were really struggling with how to conceptually understand dividing fractions. I started working with one student and suddenly when I turned around and the class had formed a circle to talk as one large group. Students began debating and explaining organically. I couldn't grab my iPad fast enough. I was able to grab a few minutes of the back and forth.

The 1st 5 day week

Students stamina is a thing. The first 5 day week is generally a long one for them (and quite honestly, for their teachers too!)

Both classes started the week in their design teams. They first thought of names for their teams. For a sampling: No Plan Inc, The King Bananas, and the Deep Thinking Divers. From there, each team began designing a google site (on the new google sites) to build team pages. This will be their landing page for materials, photos and weekly updates. To do weekly updates I'm hopefully using Kidblog. Kidblog is a great tool for class blogging. It's simple, easy to use interface allows for quick beautiful blogging. I'm going to encourage students to use a variety of media when blogging about math this year- I want some Vlogs, some podcast format (mp3 audio), and some traditional blog text and photo. Stay tuned for when that goes live, as I'm hoping for community feedback to the students.

Then we started grade level specific learning. 5th graders pre-assessed then started our volume and surface area unit. Here are some photos of them building a box that holds 12 cubes as many different ways possible:

In 6th grade students were pre-assessed on our fraction unit and we began looking at describing fractions in as many different forms as possible. From there we'll begin operational work with fractions with our goal to be able to fluently multiply and divide fractions. Here is a photo of our entry level task for that.

Wrapping Up the Week

We finished our week of inspirational math today. I skipped day 3 (cutting of shapes) because with 40 minute classes and all the paper needed to prep I decided to just move on. And I'm sure glad I did! Over the past few days we've been exploring the visual number line activity and Pascal's Triangle. In both grades I've been amazed at the level of discourse in the groups and what they've been able to uncover for new learning. All the kids have been working so hard and persevering on some challenging learning activities. I'm including some of our class conversations below to highlight the week*:

*- When summarizing as a class I've been taking pictures with my iPad and loading the photos into an app called "Notability". Once we're done, I export the note as a pdf to my google drive.  From there I use "Airserver" to broadcast my iPad onto the SMARTboard and students can follow along. This allows me to be out of the front of the class and also easily hand my iPad to a student to allow them to draw and manipulate the screen. I'm also including a table group conversation today that I recorded on my phone with an app call "AudioMemos".

Here's the rundown of the learning:
The PDF of our visual math number line.

The PDF of our work with Pascal's Triangle.

Here's the photo of the work students were talking about in the audio recording

And here's the recording of them talking about it:

Week of Inspirational Math

I'm using the week of inspirational math in all my math classes to help students get into the norms and routines of my classroom space. The week long course was developed by Jo Boaler, the world renowned expert in mathematical thinking specifically in regards to growth mindset. The idea that the brain is a flexible muscle that can grow with practice, grit and challenge.

I really appreciate the message that this sends to kids. Her launch videos explain the research and the science behind growth mindset in a way that makes sense to my students. From there we dig into different activities. Today's activity focused on building bridges from the spacial part of our brain to the logic/procedure based side. I'm including a short video that shows a few ways different groups were making connections.

Getting started

Wow. It's overwhelming to start wrapping my head around this. When meeting with Emily Rinkema (twitter: @CVULearns) I found myself even struggling to verbalize what I needed to get going. The hardest part for me is taking what I believe is a great project, breaking it into Learning Targets, and from there getting to the direct instruction lessons needed for the students to apply their learning to the project. Early days as the project takes shape, but the hope is that 6th grade will work in design teams. One class will work on designing the bell tower entrance. This space will need new cement work, benches and other items to help spruce up the look to that space as it gets redone next summer. The other project I'm hoping to see out is redesigning the gym locker rooms. This would allow students in our wing to have more access to bathrooms, something they ask for it seems every year.

To do all this I'm using a graphic organizer from the Buck Institute. They focus on PBL and put together a great document that I plan on using as often as possible. I'll start filling that in before I set up a calendar to determine when I'll teach what skills. From there, I'll check back in with Emily and have her edit and make changes. I also need to setup a time with Greg to come kick the projects off. It's overwhelming but exciting!

Before I start down the PBL highway I'm going to use Jo Boaler's (twitter: @joboaler) "Week of Inspirational Math" to help get the students up and running and give myself time to get to know them so I can create the most successful groups possible. More to come for sure!

Jared