Math Rocks!

Candidate collaborates with parents, colleagues, and members of the community to provide internal and external assistance to students and to their families, if needed, to promote student learning when necessary.  

Collaboration is vital to all aspects of my classroom enviroment.  I collaborate with a variety of people in the school district and community.  My first priority is to collaborate with parents.  I communicate with parents through email, letters, phone calls, and face to face.  These conversations are to help the parent better understand what we are learning in class and how they can help their child be and feel successful.  Parents are one key to the success of the students.   Next I collaborate with my grade-level colleagues.  I meet with my team members almost every morning to plan events, talk about student needs and curriculum,  including  any other issue relevant and timely to our goals.  We work together on interdisciplinary units like reading the book ‘Thunder Cave’ by Roland Smith where all the core teachers share the responsibilities of reading the book and relating the book to their content area as well as vocabulary building and journal writes.  I also work with other teachers on a one on one basis creating tasks that facilitate prior knowledge about concepts.  An example would be introducing punent squares to students in my class when they are learning about integers and the science teacher then works with punent squares a few weeks later in the genealogy unit. 

I work with the curriculum coordinator and the TAG facilitator for the district.  A group of district employees worked on district action plans for a guaranteed and viable math and Language Arts curriculum during a Model Schools Conference in Washington DC last October.  There is a link to the Model School Conference website on the sidebar.  The district TAG coordinator and I work together to help create activities that reach the higher-level students. For example, the TAG coordinator worked with our team on creating real world projects.  I created a proportional reasoning project that has to do with enlarging a picture in order to use the picture for use in another venue.  This authentic learning example gives students an oppertunity to analyze a process and evaluate its use outside the classroom venue.

Working with parents to help their student be successful is a critical part of collaboration.  I send home a missing assignment letter to parents so that the parents can see what work their child has not completed and help them to finish.  I also email parents about positive things I see their student do at school as well as items of concern.  If it is a major concern (good or bad) I will call the parent to notify them of the good or concern that I have.  This reaffirms for the student to know that we care about them and that their parent and I are talking about how to help them achieve their best.