Take PRIDE in Your School

It's been a couple weeks since I've blogged. There really hasn't been too much to blog about prior to this past week. The unit we're currently working on is Adding & Subtracting Whole Numbers & Decimals. I feel like the kids are getting the concept, and so I wanted to do something that was kind of fun.

Everyone loves money and eating, so I created what I call the Menu Project. The kids are responsible for creating their own menu with the food items that they want. They have to price the items, but they have to include decimals. The cool part is that they are actually making their menus with pictures and everything. Once the menus are made, then the kids will "dine" at other groups' restaurants. Groups will come to your restaurant, and the kids are responsible for calculating the total cost of the bill. They also have to calculate how much change they owe their "customers". So, the kids are still practicing working with decimals, but this way its more exciting and relevant to them. They were so excited when I told them they got to choose whatever food they wanted for their menu.

It was really cool to see the menus the kids came up with. One group did a Rangers themed menu, and all their items were named after actual Ranger's players. The creativity behind that is awesome. Some groups have amazing drawings in their menus, so it was very cool to see the artistic ability of some of my kiddos. When they finish their menus, they all run up to me and are so eager to show me their menus. They were all extremely proud of what they had come up with. This upcoming week we will "eat" at the restaurants, and I am very curious to see how it goes with the kids behavior and their ability to work with decimals.

A fun thing that happened this week was on Thursday during Adopt an Athlete. JM comes on overhead and says you have 15 minutes to find whatever you can to dress your teacher up as a clown. My first thought is, I have no clown stuff in my class. Well that didn't stop my kids. She said go, and they all took off. Everyone is running around and throwing things at me left and right to put on. With the lack of clown stuff, I was pretty impressed with what the kids came up with. All the teachers headed to the cafeteria where we are shown off to the whole school. She shows off each teacher one by one, and I was pretty happy with the cheers that I got. My class represented well. I ended up winning the competition (didn't really deserve too...) and my kids won a popcorn party. It is just really cool that I work at a school that loves to do such exciting things, but everyone is back to work as soon as it ends. We definitely work hard to play hard at McA. I definitely take pride in my school, and I love working there!