Winter: 4 Nancy: 1

Believe it or not, I have had four snow days to the last five days of school. Two winter storms in a row have nailed my current city. I'll be honest, I'm ready to be back at school. I'm sure my middle school self would be yelling at me right now, but it gets boring fast when you can't go see your friends and you already cross a bunch of stuff off of your to-do list. For example the first snow day way back in the beginning of the month I was starting to feel overwhelmed so that day was certainly needed in order to get caught up and ready to go again. This past Friday's snow day (while we probably could have had a late start) I used the day to prepare the lessons for the last two weeks. Tuesday's snow day was focused on my electronic portfolio and resume. With all of those work days, yesterday became a play day and I took on the snow to drive to Central. The drive was fine in the afternoon but took on quite some vengeance as I traveled back here last night. Given the poor road conditions and too many rural students within the area, welcome to snow day number 4. Luckily there is a big event going on at Central that I am a part of where I can go help out early but still, its time to be back at school. A week from tomorrow is my last day and I really want to see my students =(

Nonetheless, when we have had classes, Math 7 is working on solving equations and Pre-Algebra is learning how to graph linear equations. And why yes! These are the hardest chapters of the semester...so the students are really struggling keeping information they have learned considering in school one day, out for two. Thankfully, the next lesson for Math 7 was going to be a review since we were quickly losing them in two step equations and it may be that I spend a good chunk of tomorrow reviewing in Pre-Algebra also. 

In Math 7, I created a new review game for them using math jokes and a hangman app. What would happen is that the students would guess a letter and if the letter was in the word then I filled in the blank. But! if they guessed a letter not in the word, not only would they start hanging the man, but they also would have to do a problem regarding solving equations. When I used this game for solving equations with fraction coefficients, I actually started hanging the man upside down to remind the students they had to use the reciprocal (flipped fraction) to solve these problems. Also, originally I had them doing a problem for every letter they guessed, but they said that wasn't fair, in which I agreed. Plus by adding you could have a problem or your couldn't, it added suspense and energy to the game. The two jokes I used were "What did the acorn say when it grew up" ..."Geometry" (Gee-I'm-a-tree!) and "What do vegan zombies eat?" ...."Graaains." While I know the jokes are dorky, they are still jokes and even pity laughter works for me. 


In Pre-Algebra, it really stinks that I will have to leave in the midst of this chapter because I think I have really cool lessons that will help the students understand graphing and especially slope better. I definitely post pictures of how I go about this once we finally get to it...the lessons have been planned for two weeks now and I'm getting anxious. As a preview, the activity for Monday now involves taking normal pictures, placing a coordinate plane over them with two dots, and then a line through them. They will have to find the points, find the slope, and say if it is a positive or negative slope.