Lessons With Dad

As the night drew to an end and the sun started to rise, unfortunately my family and I would not do the same. My mom was eagerly waiting for her morning coffee partner. 6 o’clock came and went. 7 o’clock, 8 o’clock and finally 9 o’clock. I am usually an early riser, so my mom started to get worried. She walked over to our trailer to make sure things were OK. As she approached the trailer she noticed it was still locked up from the night before. She knocked on the door. Hmm dogs did not even bark, that’s unusual! For some reason, she just so happen to have a key to our trailer in her hand. She unlocked the patio door and opened it up. Everyone was still sleeping! Apparently, I was snoring, which I never do! She opened up and the dog’s cage. They staggered out and were barely able to walk. She immediately knew something was not right! As she approached the bed to check on us, she noticed I was foaming  at the mouth. My mom started to swipe it away with her fingers. Sarah w...

It was three year ago today that I had my most terrifying life experience. The day started out like any other day. I woke up, educated the youth of America, and scurried home quickly to beat the weekend traffic to head up north. We had a seasonal trailer in Sturgeon Bay, which we had not been up there since last October. My wife (Sarah) and I were excited to take our son (Carter) camping for the first time that year. He was only 10 months old. After making the exciting three-hour drive up north, with a 10 month old, we needed to get all of our stuff unpacked and organized. I figured we had all weekend to work on things around the trailer, so I wasn’t going to go to crazy that first night. I turned on the water, water heater, electricity, carried the dogs cage in and of course made sure the T.V. worked. My parents and brother had campers right next to ours. The Friday night ritual was once everyone got up north, got unpacked, we would make frozen pizzas, have a few...

  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...

What System I use to Gamify my Elementary Classroom In episode 3 , I share what system I use and how I use it to run my year long gamified math class. If you enjoy Lessons With Dad please like, share, tweet, subscribe or whatever it is you do! Enjoy

The Raging River Welcome to the second episode, " The Raging River! " In this episode, I take you through an end of the unit math review, which incorporated using families (groups) to defeat crossing the raging river. I used the river like a boss, in boss battles, and students had to defeat crossing the river successfully with their families. Enjoy

I am going to try something new! Yes, I know, I know. I am going to try something new again. I am going to add a Video Log A.K.A. a VLog to my website. In my first VLog I introduce myself and give background about the reason behind me starting my Blog/ VLog . I hope you like it and stay tuned for what's to come! If you like it please subscribe to my channel and never miss an episode! Enjoy!

I think the most fun I had when gamifying my year long math class was making the badges. After figuring out what System I was going to use and my Theme the next step is creating or finding Badges that correlate with the concepts expected for mastery. If you have not checked out my earlier blogs about "What System"  to choose or how to pick a "Theme" for your gamified classroom, please check them out. Once I settled on the Theme of my gamified class, I needed to incorporate some motivation for students. One of the easier motivational items you can include are badges. There are a couple of Badges I use to help motivate students in my game. In using the SBG ( Standards Based Grading ) spreadsheet there are Big Badges and there are Mini Badges. Mini Badges Mini Badges I use an SBG spreadsheet that I found and borrowed from Mr. Matera (covered in " What System .") He already had the spreadsheet all formatted and put together so all I needed to d...