Saturday Smorgasbord

Well, I'm less than a week into my new blogging resolution, and I'm already off schedule!  It's been an unusual week.  My husband and I are both pretty much homebodies who rarely venture out during the week.  But we have been out 3 nights in a row this week.  We attended a retirement seminar on Tuesday. ( After 37 of years of teaching PE he's considering hanging up his gym shoes and trading them for his fishing boots).  We met up for dinner with some old friends from out of state on Wednesday, where I discovered I DO like Indian food after basically refusing to try it for years!  Thursday was our middle daughter's birthday so we went out to dinner with the family.  I'm exhausted but no time to rest since our annual Super Bowl party is coming up.  I guess I'll sleep next week, but I did want to take some time and try to catch up on my posts.

Problem solving has been on my mind recently.  I LOVE teaching problem solving- you can read about my love for it here and here.  But I'm not having the same success this year with quite a few of my friends. So this week we spent I decided to slow down and reviewed our problem solving model, UPSCheck.  Our model is based  on the work of George Polya and teaches these 4 steps: Understand, Plan, Solve and Check. We used some problems from this set I found on TPT by Brandi Wayment to practice using the model.  (I love these problems because you can differentiate by changing the numbers.)  By the end of the week I felt like my firsties were doing a much better job of showing and explaining their thinking! I'm looking forward to watching their progress during the next few weeks.

Enjoy the Super Bowl if that's your thing and the rest of the weekend!