Sometimes I sit back at the end of a week and I can’t remember what even happened! That’s one of the reasons I’m enjoying my weekly reflections this year. It reminds me to sift through the feelings and find something positive. It’s easy to wallow in the discouragement of a busy week. I know I’m not the only educator who ends a week thinking, “That did not go as planned!” Or “I’m basically a failure and I’m wasting everyone’s time! Or “I wonder if it’s too late to trade this all in and buy a taco truck.” I mean, how many bad days can a taco truck operator actually have? I bet a taco truck driver never goes home feeling like a failure!
This week we talked about money. We finished the week being able to identify every Canadian coin and it’s value. We know why we need the cent sign and dollar sign. We even counted money quite successfully. We were not incredibly successful completing some math work sheets but everyone does understand that a horizontal math question and a stacked math question are asking us to figure out the same thing. That’s big learning for some kids. And we sang “Canada in My Pocket” a lot (though less than I would have liked.)
So yeah…clearly I was not a failure as a teacher. Nothing really exciting happened. Nothing made we want to rush home and blog. I don’t have any photos of our week. But we still had a successful week. Not a very exciting week, but, yeah, successful.
I’m thinking, however, that if I’m kind of bored with math (I didn’t even title my reflection last week!) then chances are other people are bored with it too. This week we are moving on to some 2D and 3D geometry. Or we might move on to area. In the math long-range plan I am following shapes are up next, but I’m at a different place than I though I’d be at this point, so I might do area first. Geometry fits nicely with the holidays because there are a lot of crafty projects we can do with our shapes. Every day between December 1 and the last day before Winter Break gets harder and harder, and crafty math helps us get through. Plus we can talk about snowflakes a lot, and there is a lot of geometry in snow flakes.
Sounds like I’ve talked myself into area first. Maybe we can figure out the area of the perfectly sized tortilla for my taco truck business.
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