Imagination Sparkles

When I stumbled across this article I got giddy.  How fun to combine two things I love, cats and math.  I showed the pictures to my 5th graders, only the ones that they understood the mathematical concept.  Show it to your kids or just look at it yourself.  Hope this gives you a little laugh and a smile on this hump day :) And just because you need some more cuteness in your life here is Fitch, one of my dear kitties/kiddies at our last Winter Olympic Party. He was part of a survey we were doing on favorite winter Olympic sport.  See cats + math!

Closing a lesson...this was one of the essential skills you learned in your teacher preparation program.  I would bet we can all do it effectively, but I wouldn't be surprised if you sometimes quickly close a lesson because of that darn schedule (kids are leaving for intervention, lunch, end of day, next subject, etc.).  Oh you don't....okay then its just I who does that sometimes.  So for people like me, I love to find new closing activities when they look like a. something I can use for formative assessment and b. aren't going to eat up a bunch of time.  So I was really encouraged when I stumbled across this fun little Teachers Pay Teachers freebie .  Don't assume because it is made by Mr. Elementary Math that this will just work for math.  These activities can be utilized in any subject.  So I hope this helps to slow things down or gives you another way you can still close your lesson with limited time.  

For several weeks in the month of February I spent time after work and on the President's Day holiday reading and reviewing reports for my business fraternity, Pi Sigma Epsilon .  I must admit at times when I needed to take a break from reading I found myself saying "why am I using my downtime for this?"  I took a few minutes to go back through some old Facebook pictures of my time in college and in PSE.  I ran across a lot of fun ones and it energized me to get back to my reading.  You see when I was in college I was in a chapter that submitted lots of national awards for the national conference each year.  From the end of the first semester to the end of January our lives were focused on writing reports about the year.  I remember many nights saying goodbye to my dad as he left for work at 5am and I was still up writing or working on homework that had been pushed to the side till then.  My friends and I spent a lot of time writing these reports, submitting them fo