Spark Student Motivation: Homework Pass

                                              
This is Amy and this is our first time linking up with "Head Over Heals for Teaching's" Spark Student Motivation Saturday.  Over the last few weeks, I've noticed a lack of drive in my classroom.  The concepts being taught are getting harder and the demand on my students has increased.  I am constantly trying to find new ways to motivate my students.  I've used candy, spell out word motivation, extra technology time, and extra credit points (dojo points) with many of my previous classes.  I have also purchased those cute little homework pass certificates sold at The Dollar Tree and used them for students going above and beyond.  I have not attempted the homework pass approach this school year, but after viewing my homework check-off sheet, I actually don't have a problem with my classes completing homework. This week after dealing with the same students participating, answering questions, and going above and beyond; I knew I needed something to "get those hands up."  During planning, I quickly made these homework passes and started passing them out to those students who were always participating during math discussions. 
                                                         
By Friday, it was amazing to see the number of students participating.  You can grab these passes FREE at my TPT store!  I would love to hear how you motivate your students!!

Five For Friday - November 15th

Hello everyone!  This is Kim again bringing you my "Five for Friday"link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching.  So here are my 5 random things for the week:

When I picked up my nearly 3-year-old daughter from day care Friday afternoon, she asked "Will you guys play with me tonight?"  I love how she is becoming so fluent with language.  She often cracks me up with her phrases and how much she understands.  Well fast-forward a few hours to after we get home from Friday night dinner.  I was sitting down thinking of writing this post, when she asks "Will you play with me?"  How can I refuse that?  I made a very purposeful decision to stop everything and play Candy Land with her.  These days are passing all too quickly.  As teachers we tend to pour EVERYTHING we have into other people's children.  Not that doing that is bad, I just want to be more aware of being in the moment for my own children.  So, we had a competitive game of Candy Land, and let the record show that my daughter won!

This week, the other 6th grade math teachers and I reorganized our students in our "extra help" period depending on results from a recent pre- and post-test cycle.  My group ended up modeling distributive property problems such as 3(2x + 4) by either creating a Prezi or making a video using our classroom iPads.  They learned that the number outside the parentheses tells how many groups to make that contain the contents that are inside the parentheses.  For example, one group made up a story problem pretending that they worked on a boat dock.  The man in the problem wanted to sell fish.  A boat came in with cases of fresh fish that he could purchase to then re-sell.  In the problem above, x would represent "cases of fish" in each group.  The 4 would represent how many individual fish were in each group.  So, the fisherman made 3 groups containing 2 cases of fish and 4 individual fish to sell.  In total, he had 6 cases of fish and 12 individual fish, which ultimately models the distributive property.  For 6th graders that level of understanding is awesome!  As a former high school math teacher, I can tell you I had honors students that may not be able to model and explain what the distributive property really is doing!  

I had 3 goals that I was hoping to focus on starting this week:  eating better, working out, and starting a TpT store.  I find that I will sacrifice and go overboard in relation to my teaching job, but I have little drive to do the same in eating better and working out.  In different phases of my life, I have been a healthy eater.  I just had my 2nd child, but was diagnosed with gestational diabetes in spite of being "normal" weight for my height.  It forced me to really evaluate what I was putting into my body.  As a result, I ate well and felt REALLY good.  I gained less than 15 pounds during pregnancy, which for a 120 pound girl starting out, that was pretty good!  Growing up I was always playing sports or involved in physical activities.  But now that I have 2 kids and a demanding teaching job, I just can't find the motivation to eat well or work out after getting home after 5:00 each night.  I am also wanting to start a TpT store to share resources that I am creating.  Thanks to Robyn, I now know what to do to start my store, I just again can't find the time to do it!  I know that seems like a lot of excuses, but I really just want to make my goals somewhat public in hopes that it will inspire me to get going.  I am currently watching Biggest Loser for inspiration as well!

Before leaving school on a Friday afternoon, I took the time to start a data wall.  The purpose is to show class statistics on pre-tests, formative assessments, and post-tests.  It does not show individual student results but does allow for students to set classroom and individual goals.  It may also serve to motivate some students to achieve at higher levels.  As a school, we are going through a data transformation so most of this is required.  I do hope that it helps put the spark into some of my students!

Ok, so my 5 is short and sweet...We only have 5 more school days before Thanksgiving break!  I cannot wait to spend time with my 2 precious children, my amazing husband, and the rest of my family and friends!

TGIF,

Kim

Activities Like This...Give Me Fun Feedback!

This is Kim and I am participating at http://imbloghoppin.blogspot.com/ for the "We Are Thankful For" linky party!

When I taught high school math I had a set of interactive voting devices.  Students would answer any multiple-choice or true/false questions using a little blue remote.  I do not have a set of these devices at my current middle school.  Most of the voting devices are quite expensive and some become outdated quickly as technology advances.  In the last 2 weeks, I stumbled on Polleverywhere.com.  You really, really should give this a try if you have access to computers, or if your students can BYOT (bring your own technology).  

Here's how it works.  First, you go to polleverywhere.com and create your first poll question.  It's FREE!  You can watch videos to see how easy it is to incorporate into your classroom.  For educators, there is a free plan that gets 40 responses per poll (that means for each question I ask, I can have up to 40 students respond at any one time).  Since I do not have a class with that many students, the free plan is working great right now.  There are, of course, some reasons to look into a paid version, but I am not quite there yet.  

So your polls can be multiple choice, open-ended, or even a type of question called "clickable image" which would be useful if you loaded an image like a map or a biology cell and had students identify parts.  The multiple-choice can even have images as the choices!  I have one poll that I created that asks "How do you feel about today's lesson?".  Students can click on a red, yellow, or green circle to give feedback.  Here is a screenshot of what students would see on their device:

You can be very specific in your questions or you can create more generic questions that can be used over and over.  If you look at this screenshot below, I have math specific questions, but then I also have 2 generic questions that I can activate at anytime.  

This is how I usually use polleverywhere.com.  I have them look at a handout that already has a multiple-choice question or other math problem to solve.  I select the appropriate poll.  If I have an open-ended math question, I have them type their answer into the poll text box and then add their name to the end.  I hide the answers on the screen so that they cannot wait to answer after they have seen what the majority of the class is answering.  If you have a "freeze" button on your projector's remote, you can freeze the screen so they cannot see each other's responses either.  

I then "PUSH" the poll down to the student's device.  This can be a classroom computer, a tablet, a smartphone, or any device that can access the internet.  The students simply go to your polleverywhere.com class website.  Once you have "pushed" the poll, the question is now live and students will see the poll live on their device.  

They answer the poll question and their response instantly goes on the screen.  You can hide the responses or choose to leave them visible.  The graphs are instantly updated and you can literally watch the answers come in!  If it is open-ended, you can set the visual mode to show a list of responses, a "wall" of responses, a "news-ticker" style response flow, or even a word cloud.  If the question is multiple-choice, you can see a horizontal or vertical bar graph.  

You can even click on "Response History" and get a easy to read list of responses.  On this page, you can choose to export the responses as a csv file (spreadsheet).  As you see below, you may need to have discussions about expectations with this type of technology.  This screenshot is from the first time I tried polleverywhere.com.  You can see that students are free to type anything!

QUICK OVERVIEW:

• Great for formative assessment.  Can be used as a ticket-out-the-door to set groups for the next class day.  Can replace using "sticky" notes on the board to see how students are responding.
• Great way to engage students in today's technology.
• VERY easy to set-up and use.  You can customize the look and feel of your polls.  You can download the poll questions into PowerPoint.  I have only scraped the surface of what this simple website can do.  
• Create generic questions that can be used quickly without having to spend time typing in polls.  I have one generic that says "What is the answer to this question?".  I have it set as multiple-choice and open-ended depending on the question we are working on.  I literally just "push" one of those questions down to the student devices and we are ready to respond.  
• Reserve your own polleverywhere.com website by clicking on the "How People Can Respond" dropdown on the right side of your poll question screen.  Find the blue link under "Web Devices".  It should lead you to a page to reserve your own web url.  Your students will just need to visit this one reserved page to access your polls.  They can also text in their response if you are ready to handle that!

I am a huge fan of the instant feedback that this website can provide!  In this age of data and accountability, it gives me a way to get usable data and engage students at the same time.

Here is what it looks like being used in my classroom:

Oh, I used an app called "Skitch" to annotate over the screenshots above.  Try it out too if you get a chance!

Let me know what you think in the comments section below!

Happy polling!

Kim

Competition in the Classroom

It's Amy and I'm sharing a little bit about how I motivate my students.  As we all know, multiplication is an essential skill necessary for math from third grade forward.  It's is my job to present multiplication to students using a variety of strategies such as arrays, number lines, groups of, and skip counting.  I am a firm believer that multiplication is a skill that should be DRILLED!!  Yes, all of these strategies are excellent to help students understand the concept of multiplication, but they MUST know the facts.
I teach two math segments each day.  My students take home a multiplication log and are asked to log multiplication practice minutes.  I check the log each Monday.  We graph the results for each class on a bar graph displayed on the inside of the classroom door.  The student in each class who practices the most minutes is rewarded with a certificate (not pictured).  The certificates are displayed for a week on the door.  The next week the certificate is given to the student and the new multiplication leader's certificate is displayed.  As you can see from the graph below, these students mean business.  They are neck and neck with minutes practiced.  It's awesome on Monday when the students are eager to find out how many minutes practiced they are adding to the graph. 

The students are also given multiplication practice pass-off sheets every few days.  At the end of each math lesson, when time allows, I give the students a quick one-minute drill.  The drill is based on each student's pace.  I keep a log as students pass of any set of facts.  The log is not pictured due to privacy.  Once a student passes off a set of facts their name is added to the "I CAN" posters.  Each class is represented using a different color.  As the students master facts from 0-12, they enter the "Home run Club" and are given a nice certificate and prize.  The first class to get all members in the Home run Club earns a pizza party.

Each class looks for their "class color!"  It's really cool to hear, "Look there is more blue!" or "Oh no!  They are catching up to us!"

 I keep the pass-off quizzes in this file box.  It takes me a matter of minutes to call students names out to come get their practice quiz.  They really get excited about these drills.

I use competition within the classroom in many different ways.  This is just one way to share.  I've challenged class for class, student for student, gender for gender, and table for table.  Students are more motivated to learn and become very competitive when a challenge is presented.  I am very cautious to only display the necessary information and not to criticize or point out any student "pulling" down class averages or in this case practicing fewer minutes than others.  What are some of your motivational techniques?