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).