Alright so its a couple weeks into the school year and I've already broken my vow to blog about my day to day goings on in my classroom. I could say its been a super busy start to the school year with 7 new kids added to our team in the first few days. Or I could talk about the extra work that I'm doing as the technology adviser for my son's kindergarten. But really those are just excuses and the fact is I just haven't made the time to reflect and blog.

That being said, I'm excited about how math class has started. I've never been a worksheet/ text book type of person and in fact I try to have the kids play games and create activities/multimedia pieces to learn and reinforce their math concepts and skills. However, I don't think these games/ activities have done enough to get at my students' higher level thinking and problem solving skills. Therefore, I've channeled my inner Dan Meyer to a small extent and started using some teacher created multimedia to create more engaging problems for my kids to learn and practice problem solving skills. I gave them the first of these today to work on. You can find it here. I've got back a number of responses from students (I had them work on it in Google Docs and share their responses with me) and I'm excited by some of the questioning and thinking I'm seeing. The problem itself is not the best for getting kids to question but I think its a good introduction for the students to get started on this type of activity. I've got a couple more lined up for the next couple weeks including a video of the "Locker Problem" in which I'm going to use students of mine from two years ago. I'd love to hear what people think of this activity so far and ways that I could improve it.

Thanks in advance

Eric