New Ideas

Every time I'm off of school for any period of time I spend a bunch of time planning stuff to do when we go back.  And consequently I end up excited to go back to school and try out all of the great new ideas I've come up with and/or found.  This break is no exception.

So here's a bunch of completely random stuff that I'm excited about.

I've never done this before, but I've heard of lots of classes that have and it sounds great.  I signed up for a three week trial that starts next week so I'm going try it out myself first and then make decisions about if/how to use it with my kids.  If anyone has any experience with this I would love to hear your input on it.

I took a trip into NYC to check out the new Museum of Mathematics which was very cool.  It had some really interesting things that I thought were cool.

Printing activities that require graphing right onto graph paper.  Why haven't I thought of this before? 

A bunch of pattern/function activities that will require many toothpicks.  And printed on graph paper.

@fawnpnguyen's awesome new website, visualpatterns.org.  I seriously couldn't have come across this at a more perfect time.  Project happening with this next week.

Standards based grading due to tons of amazing help from @algebrainiac.  I finally got a chance to check out her algebra 1 skills list and it too, couldn't have been more perfect for what I needed.  Very excited to finally give this a try along with about a million other awesome things she sent me :)

TONS of flooring free samples I got from Home Depot.  Very excited about this one, more to come.

Things were getting stale before break and kids were getting bored, so I'm glad to have the time off this week to actually put together all these new ideas.  My hope is for them to be interested, I'm bored of being boring.  I plan to hit the ground running next Wednesday with a bunch of stuff, and I'm quite looking forward to it.  Now the only question is how to actually fit everything in.