NCTM Annual Meeting (a month late)

Wow - it has been forever since I wrote my last post!  School has been crazy busy for the past month and I have only have 7 more school days until I am finally able to RELAX!  I meant to write this post about a month ago but time got away from me.  Better late than never - right?

If you can recall I had the opportunity to speak with a colleague about group work at the NCTM annual meeting in Philadelphia Pennsylvania.

I was amazed by the historical buildings including this beauty.

We flew into Philly Wednesday night and were lucky to be one of the first presenters Thursday morning.  It was really exciting to walk into the convention center and see all the amazing math teachers ready to learn!

I started to get butterflies when I saw Julie's and my name on the presenter board in front of our room. 

Thank goodness we had lots of colorful task cards and other table accessories to disguise our ugly tables. 

I was so relieved that our presentation went smoothly.  Teachers seemed very excited about our ideas and asked great questions throughout the session.  During the activities we tried to demonstrate the earning of "marbles" through good group work.  It was a lot harder to give marbles when you have eight large tables you are trying to observe.  At the end of the session we took pictures of our "golden groups" with my trophy. 

All the tables were great groups but we had two tables that tied for the golden group status! 

Big thanks to the teachers for being great sports and taking a picture with my trophy!  The pictures made it worth it to take up half of my suitcase with the giant and being a pound under the luggage weight limit :)

Julie and I were so happy once we finished the presentation.  We got one last picture to remember the morning before sitting in on other presentations for the rest of the day. 

There were so many interesting sessions it was really hard to decide which ones to attend.  

I am always drawn to hands on activities and found a session that had an activity that would be great for the Comparing and Scaling unit of CMP. 

This was a puzzle that we had to put together.  Once we had ours together we taped 4 completed puzzles together to make a larger version.  You can keep doing this as long as you have four puzzle pieces of the same size.  This would be so great to use for scale factor.  Students can measure the corresponding sides and find the area of the shape (great mini lesson on breaking shapes up to find area) to see how the scale factor affects the dimensions, perimeter, and area.  

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 After two and a half days of learning we got chance to take in Philly for an afternoon.  Our first stop was of course the Liberty Bell. 

 After standing in a long line with hundred of students (school trips) we headed across the street to Independence Hall.

We got to sit in the seats of the original meeting hall for the house of representatives. 

I even found a picture of my great great great (not sure how many greats) Grandfather Horatio Gates! 

Our trip to Philly was so much fun  Julie and I quickly submitted our proposal to speak in Denver next year! We are keeping our fingers crossed that our proposal gets accepted and we can get the funding to take advantage of the amazing opportunity again! 

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Memorial Day weekend!