Why I've been MIA!

So this is it!....

The reason I've been missing in action from this Blog, TpT and TeachersNotebook is due to building our gazebo and re-landscaping the gardens around it!

It took around 3 months, and without a roof still, it's nearrrllyyy done :)

Have a wonderful  and safe Christmas everyone!I've nearly finished my Mean, Median, Mode & Range bulk pack!~ After Christmas. :)

MIA & a NEW Item on Scientific Notation!

My goodness.... After finishing school 5 days ago and all the busy work around reporting and the last two weeks or school, I've neglected my blog! I'm so sorry!

I thought I would do a small post on an item I created recently on Scientific Notation!

Nothing has ever been fun abut learning scientific notation, expanded form or the basic numeral, so I thought it would be a great idea to create a resource for this!
As usual, I've included a theme specific word wall with blanks, three help cards with different examples, three different sets of domino cards and three different, fun & engaging board games with cards!

We received our timetables for next year and (so far) I am teaching Year 8, 2 x Year 9s, 11 PVM and 12 PVM!!

I would much prefer to only teach year 8 or year 8 and 9, but our school puts non-math qualified teachers on year 8 because its 'easier' to teach than year 11 or 12 PVM! :( This makes me so sad for those children.

Earlier in the year I put in a transfer to move to a high school that is accepting year 7's (our school is not) and may find out up to Day 8 if I do or don't have a transfer, so created this (and future) resources for that purpose! 

Talk about nervous... Working 8 days at my school and potentially finding out that I may not be there for day 9! Needless to say, I've cleaned out my room, packed everything in boxes, and if I don't get a transfer, it'll be easy enough to unpack =\

Back to creating my Mean, Median, Mode & Range resource! :)

TpT Cyber Monday & Bonus Tuesday SALE - UpTO 28% Off

These last few weeks have been packed with assessment, marking & reporting! Report cards aren't due until  11th December (phhewwww) but we have two exams still (around 100 papers to mark) to be marked, profiled & reported on! 

I am however, very excited to say that I am participating in TpT's Cyber Monday & Bonus Tuesday SALE.

I'm offering 20% off store-wide which means you will be able to access 28% off my store Monday & Tuesday ONLY!

I hope to see you shopping over these days! :) Thank you for your support & encouragement as always!

NEW Rounding Math Center - 20% Off!

Hoooollllyyy busy = Understatement....... I have to say that finally year 12  rankings and verification are now COMPLETE! :) I'm very pleased to say that I have 5 out of my 23 students on a VHA this year! Now just year 8 and 9 assessment to go plus reports due in 2 weeks! 

The Two-digit Rounding Winter Math Centre is super easy and ready to use! All activities have instructions and three have recording sheets. 

This unit contains:

• 48 Flash Cards
• 2 sets of Rounding Dominoes (Instructions included)
• Dice Rounding (Instructions and Recording Sheet included)
• Spinner Rounding (Instructions and Recording Sheet included)
• 2 Rounding Worksheets (Instructions and Recording Sheet included)

I have a lot of other Rounding Items on TpT here!

I look forward to the following 4, well 3 weeks with my classes! Our final week is an 'alternative week' where we do 'engaging and interesting literacy and numeracy' activities! Needless to say the number of students who attend it less than 20% of year 8 and 9s!  :( 

My FIRST November Currently!

I couldn't be more excited to participate in my first Currently after seeing these appear everywhere in September and October and have no idea where they came from and how the word spread around!!!

To say the least, I'm excited, excited, excited!! I'm so excited to say that I've found out the beautiful Farley from the Oh' Boy 4th Grade is the person to look for! :) 

My husband and I just LOVE Big Band Theory and seem to re-watch the show from season 1 until we're stuck back at the end! :)

We are finishing off our Gazebo area tomorrow (apart from the roof to still go) and will have a beautiful garden bed around the area! Will post photos soon!
Even though I'm tired, I still cannot push myself to get to bed earlier, its just so catchy watching silly shows on TV until I'm so tired I cannot be bothered to move! 

NEW Probability Unit

I've finally finished Uni (Master of Education half complete!!!) for this semester and have had some time last night to complete my Probability Unit! It's 20% off for a little while too! :)

The unit has 20 probability word walls to display around your room with the 7 activities being very engaging, colourful and multilevel  for students. They can be laminated and used as Math Centres or photocopied in grayscale and used as worksheets!

Level 1 and 2 students write as ___ out of ___ and level 3 students write as a fraction and simplify where possible.

Your little ones will be  ready to roll! Easy to read instructions with examples and answers included for all! 

I cannot wait to spend more time on my resources now I will have the time! I cannot believe it's week 5 this week already! My year 12's are finished at the end of week 6! Time is flying... 

FLASH Halloween SALE & Pictures

I'm having 15% off storewide to celebrate my fantastic Halloween weekend!

What an extremely BUSY weekend. I couldn't have had a more exciting time with Max (and all of us) carving our very first pumpkin! 

A very awesome experience and very effective lit up at the front windows. 

We went to the Manly Harbour Halloween festival and unfortunately we ended up very wet and windy because of poor weather, but it was a fantastic evening with my 2 DEVILS! 

I have so many resources on my 'to create list' but I don't finish this semesters UNI assessment until this Friday, so after that I will be free to create!

I hope everyone has had a wonderful weekend and a great beginning to the week is on its way! :) 

My FIRST Halloween & NEW Probability Unit

We don't really celebrate Halloween in Australia and consequently I've never dressed up in Halloween costume!

The closest I've come to Halloween is our Annual Kiters Sports Day and as you can see from the pictures in 2010 it was Angels & Devils themed!

It will be REALLY EASY to dress Scott & Max up as Devils! Me on the other hand... I have a witches hat... and that's it =\  We're also going to carve a pumpkin too! ANOTHER FIRST!

I'd love some suggestions as to what to wear for Halloween?

A sneak peak of the Probability Unit!

I've also been working on a probability unit with 20 Probability Word Walls and so far with 7 separate math centres over three levels!

I'm still working on Instructions, more levels and answers. I'm excited to complete this unit and use it next year (who knows what year level I'll have then!).

What else would you like to see in your probability units?
 

Hooting Rounding Dominos is FAMOUS!

Okay maybe it was an over reaction, but I am so excited to say that Jennifer from Live.Teach.Create blog has posted about Math Work Stations for Middle School - That work and has included one of my items in her review!

Jen's blog looks at scrapbooking projects, home decor, weekly favourites from all over, things that I am doing in daily life, creations for my classroom and much much more!

Jennifer has her students engaging in my Hooting Rounding Decimal Dominoes with groups of students rounding to the nearest whole number and to the nearest tenth.

It was funny to read how Jen had to spend some time teaching students how to play dominoes - this generation IS really different!

Classroom Design, Singing & Excel

I have just LOOOVEEEDD these first two weeks back!

I'm sure I wrote in another post that my year 8s are on a Data & Statistics unit and rather than just working through exercises from the textbook, I've been getting students to create a column graph by hand on grid paper, create them in Excel and then write a small paragraph describing their graph!

They have really loved going on the computer and the challenge of having a very strict time-line! We have 70 minute lessons, 10minute introduction/ review, 30 minute creating frequency tables and column graphs by hand, pack up and head to the library (where I book the laptops) and around 20 minutes to complete the graphs in Excel with correct axes labels and Headings! :) PPhhhewww!

Today we sung the Mean, Median and Mode Song (to Row Row Row your boat):

Mode, Mode, Modes the most

Average is the Mean,

Median, Median, Median, median,

The number in between.

I love using songs or catchy tunes to engage students in Maths and their favourite from today (they asked to loop the clip/ song for 15 minutes!) was "Mode, Median, Mean and Range by Gigi Shadid"!

My Year 8s even asked if they could perform it on assembly!! Yikess ;) 

My Classroom! :)

Other Classrooms

The above photo are three pictures of my classroom showing how I use the empty space in my classroom to represent what we're currently focusing on at the moment.

I have a year 8 board on the left and year 9 on the right to assist those lower level students who need continual prompts and won't look in their book.
To the left is a picture of what other classrooms look like! I have to say I love mine and so do my kiddies :)
I hope you are all having a great week!

10% OFF SALE for 24 Hours

I couldn't be more excited to announce my first 100 sales and 98 follwers on TpT! I was going to wait until I had 100 of each but I couldn't contain my excitement and wanted to pass on my appreciation to EVERYONE who has supported me and especially those who have given feedback! :)

I am offering a 10% off all my items for 24 hours!

FREEBIE & Gazebo Decking

What a bussyyyy weekend!

Firstly, I created a Number Line FREEBIE for you all to use in either your Math Centers or to contact onto your students desks! The Number Line FREEBIE contains:

• -5 to 5
• -10 to 10
• -20 to 20
• Blank 11 spaces
• Blank 21 spaces

We had Max again here this weekend which was lovely, and he was so excited to be with us to nail in all the decking on the Gazebo!

After about 5 hours total or cutting, nailing and Bunnings trips, the decking was finished on the Gazebo.

Max calculated that of the 700 nails used in total on the deck (100 per 5 boards) that he nailed around 350 of them!

Pretty decent for an 8 year-old I think. 

First Week Back & NEW Multiplication Games

I admit it... I really do... I've just LOVED my first week back at school! This is 1st week of our final 10 weeks of the school year and I love the fact that my year 8s are working on data & statistics and my year 9s are on probability.

I

've been able to have my year 8s writing Hypothesis about popular cars, collecting data from the staff car park, reflecting on their hypothesis and creating column graphs by hand and also in Microsoft Excel. It's been so wonderful to see students having fun and interest in what they learn! It brings a HUGE smile to my face each day. :)

I unfortunately had a QCS PD (a test all Yr 12 Queensland students have to sit) I had to attend on Thursday and missed all my classes, but I love the fact I get to mentor year 11 students this Term on short response questions for the QCS test!

I've also had some time (very little though) to complete my Multiplication Tri Ominos Game - 4 Math Centers throughout this week and upload them. I'm so excited to put these into my Math Centers as my Juniors need more practise with their multiplication tables and these allow us to check for higher level fluency/ understanding.

Max is here this weekend so we've spent Friday night at Club Night swimming where he's shaved around 2 seconds each off his 25m breaststroke and freestyle, squad and fun swimming (coin diving) this morning and gazebo decking alllllllllll day! We're very frequent Bunnings users! Photos tomorrow! :)



Fraction, Decimal & Percentage Dominos in USE!

I took a lot of photos towards the end of last term and I completely forgot to upload them! Here are my year 8s using my Halloween Percentage and Fraction & Fraction and Decimal Dominoes. I just love how creative they became when arranging them! They were competing with each other for the most confusing maze :)

It was so lovely to see some of my lower level students being able to use their calculators to divide the fractions and get the decimal or percentage answer and see the relationships between them as they progressed through the cards! It was adorable to see one of my highest level year 8 students ask me to remind him how you convert between fractions and percentages (4/20 the specific question)! After one example, needless to say he was extremely embarrassed and laughed it off! :)

It reminds me how necessary continual revision of concepts are throughout the entire year and how easy it is to focus only on the set curriculum which benefits students at the time, but not in the long run.

FREE Multiplication Game!

I know I'm procrastinating again, but I created a small freebie for everyone focusing on 5 times tables.

FREE 5 x Multiplication Tri Ominos has 27 multiplication questions and 18 answer tri ominos. Students need to solve two multiplication questions on one side of the tri omino and match it with the answer on another tri omino.

I have more multiplication tri ominos currently in draft form to be posted soon! Back to my planning I go!! :) I hope everyone is enjoying their Saturday/ Sunday!

Gazebo & NEW Tri Ominos!



Gazebo with joists

I think, no I KNOW we're procrastinating! My husband and I BOTH being teachers means that this is officially our second last day of the holidays! NNNnnnnnOOOooOOoooooO! I can hear every Qld teacher saying this!
We decided today to put the joists across the bearers on the Gazebo we're building in our back yard. Amazingly I didn't think this would be tttooooo time consuming, but as always, I was wrong! (Excellent procrastination tool)... Although I HATE wasting time during the day when I can do planning at night! :)


I DID however get up somewhat early for a Saturday and begin my Rounding Decimals Tri Ominos #1 which I will continue to work on tonight and tomorrow!
I am going to add ONE or TWO more levels to it! It's only listed for $1.50 at the moment, but when I add more levels/ tri ominos for rounding to the nearest whole number and to two decimal places, I will up it to $2.50 or $3.00! Which means if you've already bought it, you'll get the updates at a bargain price. I was just too busy to finish all the levels this morning!

What type of tri ominos would you like to see designed!?

Now back to planning this up coming 10 week term!