I've been having a hard time finding my mojo for this upcoming school year. I'm blaming it on the fact that I was on the road for basically all of July - I spent 6 nights at home between July 8th and August 3rd. All of it was great and I'm really glad I went but in the week since I've been home, getting ready for school has been at the bottom of my list. My son was extremely patient with my absence and I've tried to make it up to him by squeezing all of our usual summer field trips into these two weeks before I go back. On Tuesday we went to a local science museum and had a ball.
On the way home, we stopped by a Habitat ReStore to see what we could find. I was thinking about flexible seating in my classroom and hoped we'd find something I could repurpose. Unfortunately, the seating they had wasn't what I needed. A late afternoon thunderstorm hit as we were in the store so we decided to wait it out. As we were wandering, I found a tall red dresser that was about podium height. As I was leaning on it waiting for the storm to stop, I realized that it would be a perfect projector stand in my classroom - a good height and extra storage. Bonus! The price was right ($25) and it came home with us.
I skipped the sanding and stripping steps (Bad crafter!) and just covered it with two coats of a black semi-gloss. It did a great job of covering up the red and gave me a nice blank canvas.
When I was standing in the ReStore, I imagined covering the dresser with all kinds of vocab and graphs from my courses. I had picked up a 12 pack of acrylic paints from Michael's and went to town.The majority of my Math 1 course covers three function families: Linear, Exponential, and Quadratics and so I made each of the three sides correspond with a function family. The other major topic is a small Statistics unit. I had a hard time deciding what to do with Stats and I decided to go with comparing to box and whisker plots.
The drawers were examples of sequences as well as the rate of change formula. That one is so central to the course that I knew it needed it's own drawer.
I had to add in a couple of TMC18 shoutouts with a Desmos logo and my attempt at an Islamic Geometry design on top. Trying to use a compass on top of a dresser was an experience that I don't recommend! :)
I put one thing on there that doesn't tie into my course as a reminder for myself - the absolute value function. A reminder to stay positive.
I'm heading in on Tuesday to get my room set up. This was definitely an example of Procrasticrafting - probably should have been planning instead - but I think this will end up helping my find my mojo more than planning would have.
The drawers were examples of sequences as well as the rate of change formula. That one is so central to the course that I knew it needed it's own drawer.
