Lessons With Dad

   As I am writing this many of us are quarantined in our homes, hoping to protect our loved ones from catching this awful COVID-19 virus that has shut down the country. In my young life and 11 years of education, I have never seen or experienced anything like this, nor did I ever fathom that I would. In my wildest dreams I could not have ever predicted such a nightmare to occur, yet here we are in the midst of it.    As I look back on my last day with my students Friday, March 13th (fitting it was Friday 13th), I remember thinking that there may come a time when we would postpone school due to the virus. I never thought it would have been so drastic. In the last minutes before walking them out the door, I put out packets for them to take, in the case we were not back the following Monday. Spring break was just around the corner, so I figured we would push through until Spring Break and then the district would examine the situation further. Needless to say tha...

  After a few weeks, and a mouse incident behind us, I was finally starting to settle in as a 2nd grade teacher. It was not my ideal age, but it was a job. Having just finished my student teaching, a job was exactly what I needed. One morning when I arrived at school I noticed there were a bunch of unfamiliar faces walking into the building. I asked a co-worker where everyone was today? She informed me they had a curriculum meeting up at the district office and we may even be short subs today. If that was the case we would need to fill in places throughout the day. Well, adapting, filling and subbing has what I have been doing best the last few weeks and today didn’t seem to be any different from any other day. So on I went to get my day started.      As the day went on and my class had sub after sub. I could start seeing the tide change throughout the day. I was a sub too, but I had already been there a few weeks and pretty much had the routine and expectat...

As a new graduate who just finished his undergrad work, I was ready to  change the world one child at a time. When I finished my student teaching it was in the middle of the school year, so no one was hiring. I was taking sub jobs daily to try to earn some money before applying for a full-time teaching position in the fall. While subbing I got to know a good amount of teachers and they started to request me as their sub. Business was booming and I soon became busy on a daily basis. While subbing one day I learned of a 2nd grade teacher who was going to be on maternity leave soon and needed a long-term sub for the last three months of the school year. Although I did not have a lot of experience in younger grades I decided to  apply to be her long-term sub. I was thrilled when I got a call informing me that I got the job. It was a huge sigh of relief to know that for two and a half month and I would not have to worry about being woken up at 5:30 in the morning, askin...

   After wrecking my brain trying to figure out what would engage 4th graders more in the classroom, I settled on games. Afterall, what 9 or 10 year old does not like playing games! I needed to figure out how I could bring games into my classroom, while having them align to the standards. After doing some research I came across two approaches, Game Based Learning (GBL) and Gamification. It took me a while and a lot of research to understand and figure out some of the differences between the two. I will do my best to portray how I understand each one of them and what the difference is.  Game Based Learning  When I went to the conference I realized the speaker that got my inner fire burning was talking about GBL. I thought it would be inspiring, motivating and engaging for students to use the GBL approach in the classroom. So, what is GBL? As I have to come to understand it, GBL is using gaming elements and strategies of a traditional style video games, with d...

Explore Like A Pirate   The best decision I made when trying to decide to go with game based learning or to gamify my classroom was reading the book " Explore Like a Pirate ." by Michael Matera. After researching and reading countless articles online, his book help clarify the difference between game base learning and gamifying the classroom, while also persuading me to Gamify my year long math class.    "Explore like a Pirate" is a fairly easy read and it gives you concise instructions on how to go about gamifying the classroom. It is set up very nicely that if you follow the directions things just start falling in place.    After I made the decision to gamify my math class I needed a starting point. "Explore like a Pirate" tells its readers to start with picking a theme. The theme can be per unit or a whole year it depends how you want to run your game. I teach 4th grade and one of the big things we do throughout the year is we have a week long cel...

   Before I dive in to my fatherly duties and the classroom, I figured it might be helpful for you to know a little about myself first. I am in my tenth year of being a male elementary school teacher in Wisconsin, that's right a male elementary teacher! I surprise myself sometimes when I hear those words come out and the fact that I have survived for ten years is shocking!    I come from a very close family and am the youngest with an older brother and sister. I have been married to my lovely wife for almost five years now. We have a son who will be four this summer and and a daughter who will soon be turning two. To say our lives are crazy and hectic is an understatement. My wife is a nurse and works 12 hour night shifts. For some reason hospitals do not close on weekends so every other weekend I am running daddy day care from home. All kidding aside, as with anything with kids there are trying days and days you wouldn't change for anything. I love being able to ...