I love statistics. I love numbers. I love all of the interesting stories numbers can tell, and I love trying to interpret what causes peaks and values in any data set. I have spreadsheets full of student data that I’ve started analyzing for my new students, everything from previous reading scores and math scores to…
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An Epic First Day of School
Thursday was one of the best first days of school I’ve ever had. It was an event that hooked the kids in and hopefully left them excited for the school year. All day long I kept hearing “this is awesome” and “best class ever” and the occasional “Mr. Stock you’re weird.” Keep in mind this…
Having a growth mindset when things don’t go according to plan
I’m an overplanner. When it comes to anything, I overresearch, overplan, cross reference and overall look way too deep into anything I do. Before I came to the ISTE conference this year I had a color coded spreadsheet with listings of the first and second choice of sessions I wanted to attend. I had a…
Epic Reverse Quest
As the year was coming to a close a couple weeks ago, I was trying to think of some epic way to wrap everything up and recap the highlights from the entire year. I thought about doing a review Kahoot! or some sort of challenge activity. In years past I’ve had the scholars create board…
Review Dominoes
Materials: Domino Pages Time: 10-15 minutes (depending on how many boxes you want students to complete) Directions: Divide the students into groups of 3-4. Give each group a set of domino pages. Instruct each group to line up the pages so that the picture before and the picture after share a connection. Groups must be…
The Grid Challenge
Materials: Construction Paper, markers, 5-10 terms for the side of the page Time: 10-15 minutes (depending on how many boxes you want students to complete) Directions: Divide the students into teams of 2-4 players. Ask each team to come up with a random letter of the alphabet and write those letters along the top of…
Waiting for Permission
Today I boxed up 691 books to send off to elementary schools in our district. This is the 4th year in a row I’ve organized the Books for Backpacks program. The goal is to get books into the hands of kids who might not have access to getting a brand new book on their own….
Why my #five4five is getting posted on day 10
Last week I heard about the #five4five challenge on the Well Played podcast and thought it sounded like a great idea. The challenge was to try something new each day over the course of five days. I decided to write a blog post each day. The plan started out great. I wrote my first blog…
Video Announcements Rock
For the past two years I have started almost every class with video announcements. I talk about upcoming due dates, classroom reminders, birthday shout outs, the quote of the day and wrap-up with my catch phrase. There are several reasons why I do this: It gives me the chance to do administrative tasks (take attendance,…
More than Just a Data Point
Yesterday was the last day of MAP testing. I think I was more nervous than the students. I want the students to do well. I want their hardwork to pay off, and I want them to be able to see growth from the beginning of the year. As I looked over the final scores, I…