What have you guys been up to?!

Whew! It has been an intense past two days for me! I'm not sure if I've explained how blogging works for me, but I wanted to just let you know what it looks like in terms of my reliability. My afternoon schedule allows me three chunks of time to work on planning/blogging/checking papers/etc. These are M-F at lunch (provided there are no meetings that I have to attend and that I am not on lunch duty), M/W/F during 6th period (again, barring meetings), and T/H 7th period. For emails to be sent out to you on time (they should arrive to your inbox between 3 and 5p) I have to blog what I'm going to blog for the day by 3p. So, in a case like yesterday and today when I'm on lunch duty and have afternoon meetings until 3p... sitting down to blog becomes incredibly difficult! But, I try my best to keep to a schedule, thus insuring you get your daily update as regularly as possible. :)

With that being said, we've been busy moving forward towards completing our first unit on Order of Operations and Exponents.  That's meant spending some time yesterday and today engaged in working through order of operations problems and spending time working on memorizing our exponents/powers.  When we test on these two topics (which will fall at the end of next week), they will be tested together.  I have great expectations for their success! :)

We've also in the past two days started reading "The Number Devil" which Yael and her family have graciously let me borrow because my own personal copy is on loan to another middle school teacher. :)  Yesterday we read through the first "chapter" or night (ask your kids!) and today we read about the second night of Robert's adventure.  If you've never heard or read the book, I recommend checking it out the next time you are in a bookstore.  I've posted a picture of the book below. :)

Over the weekend the kids can be working on memorizing their exponents.  If they wanted to work on some order of operations problems... they are more than welcome to google "order of operations" -- there's some neat stuff out there. :)  Onward!