Productive Days (who needs a holiday, after all?)

Whoever said teachers get a lot of holidays speaks from blissful naivety, total ignorance or a combination of both.  Over the past four days of school "holidays" I have handed in an assignment, planned my Measurement & Geometry lessons, found video clips for each topic and spent a ton of time creating resources.

I'm going to be flap-booking my way through M&G this term.  Above is part of just one flap book I've created from scratch this week.  I'm growing a little bank of templates so I can use the basic shapes for other flap books as well.  That will save me heaps of time in the future.

Last year I used flap books and other interactive notebook type of activities a few times, and my kids loved them. I felt like shape, angles and lines just fit really well with the idea, so that's what we'll be doing.  What I love about interactive notebook activities, is that the kids are highly engaged, the vocabulary seems to stick with them better, and the information is in their books in a very organised fashion without taking up heaps and heaps of space.  The flap books give them an opportunity to draw examples and write their own definitions, so hopefully this information will be firmly embedded in their smart little brains.

And this idea gets the Mr Busy tick of approval.  I showed him the flap book I created for 2D shapes and he reckoned he wouldn't mind being in my class, because Yr11 Maths doesn't look quite like that much fun!