21 Days Until Our Expedition Begins

"Tabula Rasa"

"Tabula Rasa" is the Latin term for "blank slate."  I look at my classroom and see all of the possibilities for the year.  We are hard at work today sorting and organizing the books for the beginning of the year.  It is exciting to know that so many of these books will be lovingly read and students will become lost in these adventures.  I love books and I do my best to keep my classroom library jammed with fun books.

It is exciting to know that I never have to do things the same way.  I look forward to trying new things and building off what has been successful in the past.  Every year is a new challenge and a new opportunity to succeed in new ways.  I love looking back at my education and knowing that each year had its special moments.

In the same way, each student gets to come to my room with "tabula rasa."  Everyone starts fresh with a clean slate.  I am aware of the past, but each student gets a fresh start to show me that they have grown and are ready to have a great year.  I love being able to build someone up that might have had struggles in the past or take someone successful and help them soar even higher.

I can't wait to get started this year and I look forward to meeting some of you tonight at the Back to School Blast!  Remember I will be in the dunk tank at 6:45 and would love to have you help me cool down in the water.

25 Days Until Our Expedition Begins

I sent out my letter to welcome you to the blog yesterday.  I will be gone this weekend, but I hope to welcome some viewers when I get back on Monday.  I hope that this project excites you as much as it does me.  I love to share the cool things that we do in class, but sometimes I run out of time.  I can't wait to share this journey with you and your children.

One of the things that I love to teach most is problem solving.  I concentrate on mathematical problem solving and I look forward to using this blog to help challenge your children to stretch their mathematical problem solving.  The key to problem solving is to ask questions.  What are they asking me?  Are they trying to trick me?  Have I considered all of the variables?  We will learn many strategies this year, but I like to see how students attack problems before I show them the solution.

I will leave you with this problem for the weekend.  If you have seen it before it is still a good challenge to see if your children can use all the information.  The question is how many triangles can I find in the above figure.  You could redraw it or lay it out with toothpicks to help them solve the problem.  They need to be able to define a triangle as a three sided shape and then make sure they don't stop at the simplest answer.  I am going to try making a video on Monday to explain the solution so stay tuned.

26 Days Until Our Expedition Begins

Meet Mr. Montgomery Day 1

I love to play games.  I have always loved to play board games from the time that I was a child.  I now collect and spend most of my free time playing "euro" board games and Magic the Gathering the card game.  I love how these games challenge my intellect and make me think outside the box to solve problems.  Game theory can be used to solve many problems in life.

We grow up playing games like Candyland, Risk, and Monopoly.  I am sad that it has taken our country so long to embrace the type of strategy board games that became popular in Germany and across Europe.  My life opened up when I found these games that aren't based solely on luck or domination.  I like to play games where there are multiple avenues to victory so I don't have to ruin your plans in order to execute my own plan to win.  I will be bringing up games and game theory a lot because it is a great parallel to learning.

If you really want to bring your family together, try getting a cooperative game like Forbidden Island, Pandemic, or Flashpoint: Fire Rescue.  As a competitive person, I thought that the idea of a cooperative game sounded silly.  They are now one of my favorite things to play as the whole team can think and plan together to defeat an engine that adds difficulty as the game progresses.  

If we work hard this year, I like to do a unit on game design where I share some of my favorite games and we work together to design our own learning games.  I am still a kid at heart and I love to get down and play games on the floor.  I think many of our most important social lessons can be taught by sharing a game experience and learning to respect our opponents and the rules of the game.

27 Days Until Our Expedition Begins

Ownership

Mowing the lawn was one of the jobs that I hated the most.  I didn't like doing it at home as a teenager and I didn't like doing it at the camp where I was a maintenance worker.  I think my dislike came from the amount of effort that went into the job and days later you were looking at the lawn knowing you would have to do it again.  The worst part of summer was looking at the lawn mower.

When I bought my first home, I dreaded the idea of having to mow my lawn for the next fifty years.  I own about an acre of land with about half of that being grass.  I am also notoriously cheap when it comes to spending money on things I can do cheaper.  I took an old push mower from a relative and went off to miserably push mow a half acre.

An amazing thing happened when I finished.  I was tired and sweaty, but as I gazed out over my lawn I felt a sense of pride.  I had mowed the lawn hundreds of times, but this one felt different.  I was proud of MY grass looking so nice.  I owned this grass.  This was MY lawn.  This sense of ownership superseded my disdain for the chore of mowing.  I now enjoy my walk across my lawn because I know it will make my lawn look nice.

My goal as a teacher is to help your children feel that way about OUR classroom.  They are not entering MY space at school.  They will be walking through the door to OUR classroom.  We share all of the space in the classroom.  I try to take up very little space with MY things and those are usually just places where I have to store confidential things.

Changing the vocabulary from "my" things to "our" things shifts the responsibility to all of us to look out for each other.  Your child may dislike doing chores at home, but they may feel the desire to help clean "our" space.  I have gotten compliments from the janitors every year because I expect that we will have the cleanest work space in the school at the end of the day.  It won't be because we have one or two people picking up, but it comes from expecting every student to pick up one or two things and work as a team to create a clean environment.

At home you may try adding some ownership to kids to help encourage them to do jobs around the house.  You could ask them to make a schedule for their jobs or help decide who does which jobs.  If they have a messy room like I did as a kid, you could have them help decorate, pick out paint, or choose the layout of the room.  Sometimes this sense of ownership helps create a desire to keep the area neater and more presentable. 

28 Days Until Our Expedition Begins

I promise that no one will ever accuse me of holding your child to low expectations.  I went up to school and started digging through some files today.  I love dreaming about the clay that I have to work with.  I inform myself about past abilities, but then I will put it away before school starts and treat each student as if they have limitless potential.  Kids tend to live up to the expectations you have for them.

I try to challenge myself each year to be a better teacher and to reach students in a new way.  I can't wait to start molding this new class into another successful team of students.  I plan to use this blog before school to talk to parents about qualities that are important to me and that I expect in my students and to take some days that will be more about me personally for the kids to start to get to know me.

Goals are super important to me.  I sign every student communication and yearbook with the simple words AIM HIGH!  Kids are filled with potential and too many times they have an interaction that causes them to start to doubt their own potential.  I will do my best to show them how to set goals and to persevere through times of doubt or uncertainty. 

When you set expectations for school and home be careful not to use words like always or never (you always do this or you never do this.)  These statements tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies.  Try to use your communication to encourage and reinforce appropriate actions.  We will be talking about setting goals and accepting responsibilities at school.  I don't run my class in a way that assigns jobs to students.  I try to make each job a team responsibility and count on students pitching in when they see a need.

I can often tell who is given responsibilities at home because they jump right in and help clean up a mess or help out a classmate who needs them.  We will work to help each teammate see the good in working together and pitching in to make our room clean, organized, and ready for maximum learning.  Second graders can do amazing things when they are given high expectations and supported in a positive way when they meet those expectations. 

29 Days Until Our Expedition Begins

Kids need lots of tools.  I will be working on filling their academic tool boxes with all kinds of new tools this year.  We will be learning reading strategies, math algorithms, the process of scientific inquiry, and many more exciting and new tools to solve academic problems.  The student who has the most tools at their disposal is the one that is most prepared to meet the challenges that life throws at them.

Curiosity might be the most important tool that your child can have.  Curiosity helps them get the most out of school every day because they are willing to listen and try a new tool out.  Stubbornness can often lead to students falling behind if they don't have the willingness to try a new strategy that might be quicker or easier.

Along this line, one of the most important things you can do with bright, young, curious students is to teach them about using mechanical tools.  The parallels between solving real life mechanical problems and academic school problems are great.  Teach students how to safely use hammers, wrenches, and screwdrivers.  I have learned some of my greatest lessons from disassembling a dryer, a computer, a clock radio, and recently my garage door.  It stimulates a young mind to see how these seemingly complex things are really a collection of simple parts and simple machines.

If you have a mechanical job to do, grab some extra safety goggles and have them join you to see how things work.  Let them unscrew the lugs when you are changing a tire after you loosen them.  Along with being a great bonding time, it helps build confidence to take on challenges that they may have thought were too difficult for them.  Through all of this though, remember that safety should always come first.

 

32 Days Until Our Expedition Begins

What are you stoked about?

I was sent this video last year during a time where I was feeling fatigued.  This video encouraged me and helped me dream about what I want to do differently this year.  First off, I do not advocate that you leave public schools.  This young man, while very bright, obviously lives in a different financial world than most of us due to his exceptional opportunities.  I hope that is not the message that you get from the video.  I hope it helps you dream about what education can be like even in the public school.  This blog is one way that I think I can help bring these challenges to students and as a team we can give them this type of education.

I want to help bring out your student's creativity and excitement.  We have things that we have to cover this year to meet our goals by the state, but I am not going to be afraid to take a different approach if that is in the best interest of my students education.  I want to approach difficulties with creative solutions and bring excitement to class everyday.  I hope this video helps motivate you as a parent to listen to what your child is interested in and help them find ways to express that through their learning.  I hope to help you find resources to do that.  I also will be stressing good nutrition, exercise, and healthy relationships along with academic pursuits this year.  Healthy bodies and healthy self images help brains function best and help us get the most bang for our buck every day.

33 Days Until Our Expedition Begins!

I am enjoying a day of reading in my yard.  I hope you have enjoyed your summer and I hope everyone participated in the summer reading program.  When I was cross country runner, the hardest thing about the summer was having the discipline to run and be ready for the season.  In the same way, it is okay for your student to have taken a break for the summer.  It is important that they get back into the habit of reading at least twenty minutes a day everyday.  We will be jumping right into reading work on the first day of school.  This year we expect second graders to build the endurance to be able to do reading activities for sixty minutes by the halfway point of the year.  I know many of my students enjoy reading, but if you get out of the habit it will be a more difficult start.  I will expect that students can read independently for twenty minutes from the first day of school.  I hope everyone has a great month of August.  I am counting down the days until I can get into my classroom and start this adventure.