End of SDE Conference, Trying to Get Home

Well I made it through a wonderful week in Vegas.  I met many wonderful teachers and learned so much (I think my head might be a little overloaded-in a good way).

I am currently sitting in the airport after this wonderful conference, patiently (okay doing my best to patiently wait) for my flight home.  It has been delayed twice now.  It is currently scheduled to leave an hour and a half later than it was suppose to, but what can I do???? I decided to make the best of it and begin going through some of my notes from the conference and sharing a few new ideas/activities/apps that I learned about this past week.

Here goes:

1.  One session I attended on Monday was about Becoming a Guided Math Guru!  Even though I have been doing small group math listening to Reagan Tunstall talk about how she organizes and conducts Math in her classroom really brought some ideas together for me.

• First She has created for her classroom a Daily Math Warm UP Schedule.  Each day she has a concept/activity that the kids work on for the first 5 minutes of math time.  I liked this idea because it keeps the kids from getting bored and it still practices past concepts.  The best day probably for the kids is Friday when she has some kids of Fun Friday review.
• Second in her schedule is here Whole Group Math time.  This last about 20 minutes but some days it might be shorter if the teacher just need to give direction for the Guided Math/Small Group time.  The is a time that she shares/teaches general information on new concepts.
• Third is when she does Guided Math/Small Group Math.  She has this time set up where their are 5 groups in her room (this would depend on number of kids and time), but these five groups rotate through 5 stations, with each station lasting about ten minutes. 
• Last she has the class come back together to conduct a reflection for their learning during the Guided Math time.

The reason I liked this session so much is because I already have some of this in place in my room, but I needed some ideas for the rotation of my Guided Math time.  This session gave me a jumping off point and when my brain settles down in a couple of days this is going to be one thing I am going to working on sketching out for next school year is how to manage the rotations in my Guided Math and Small Group time.

I found on Reagan Tunstall's Blog -Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits a post she did on this session.  Here is the link if you would like to read how she does Guided Math.

The post is titled: Guided Math Galore

Well this is one session I have had time to reflect on while sitting in the airport.  I will post another session soon.  I hope this helps to give you some ideas and guidance on your Guided Math Time.  I personally believe in this time and am always looking for ways to improve my Guided Math lessons.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Check back soon.

Leslie