ahora vamos a contar

my kids make me look good. the summer school math facilitator and a district bigwig walked in at 8:15 this morning as we were reviewing the math warm-up. none of my students knew the names of shapes and i wasn't sure if i was making up the word pentágono, so i had just grabbed a dictionary to look it up when they walked in. after we finished that up, we reviewed the word problem. my kids participate quite often, so their eagerness to solve the problem and explain each step certainly wasn't an act.. i've just trained them well =P as i circling the room checking individual work while a student solves the problem on the overhead, there are a series of flashes... picture taking, wtf?!? then they were gone. several minutes later, my facilitator returned to leave me this note:

The learning environment in your classroom looks really good.
Even more impressive is the students' involvement in the lesson! They talk/share their strategies and their thinking.
A impressed me when he came up with "quintagono" for a pentagon. Excellent! Thanks for doing a great job!

considering i was starting to feel exceptionally helpless (today we're doing multiplication and hopefully starting division if all goes well), that was a nice little ego boost. these work packets i've been making them leave me with an awful lot of down time. doot doot doo.