Exhausted, but Excited

At 3:30 when the bell rang today... I was exhausted.  I was also pleased with the day's lesson.  My district is new to C-SCOPE.  I heard lots of horror stories but decided to go into it with an open mind.  I knew if I didn't there was no way it was going to work.  I'm so excited to say that so far, I love it.  It's a lot more prep work than I'm used to and a lot different way of teaching math concepts, but I can already see some of the purpose in their sequence and in their activities.

I saw lightbulbs going off like crazy today.  I heard so many OH!!!s.  I LOVE that.  My kids were working non-stop from start to finish... no time to get in trouble.  I LOVE that.  Several made comments that my class was a lot of work and several others made comments about how much they liked math so far.  I LOVE that. 

First thing we did-  Fraction strip ruler activity!  This really helped the kids visualize fractions and make connections to measurement.  They also could visualize the equivalent fractions that we discussed yesterday :)

Then we made vocabulary foldables... each flap lifts up to a definition and example.  I have a lot of LEP students and have had to force myself to put more emphasis on vocabulary... its not something I worked on enough last year.  I forget that math is a different language for my kids.  

Mixed numbers and improper fractions!  The top two doors open to definitions and the bottom open to algorithms for converting.  Before teaching algorithms I gave the kids lots of pictures until they could explain what was happening on their own.   We'll see tomorrow how well it stuck :)