New year, new country, new school, new grade level, new language.

After spending several years teaching in Latin America, I'm back in the United States. In an interesting turn of events, I'm at a two way immersion school so I teach in both English and Spanish, my first time teaching in Spanish even though I taught in Latin America. I'm teaching fourth grade, a grade I haven't taught since my math teaching revolution. So it's essentially like teaching it from scratch again. And I'm also working with the most diverse group of students ever: linguistically, culturally, economically, special educationally (is that a thing?), behaviorally, etc. 

In so many ways, I feel like a first year teacher again.

Except I can say with gratitude and confidence that I am not. I have a whole tool box of strategies, resources and people. 

So when I was given the Eureka Math teacher book and told by the district to "keep up", I knew exactly what to do. 

I have spent the last month since school started looking at my ridiculously long and boring Eureka lessons and figuring out what is the goal of the lesson, going to the standards (can't emphasize this enough!) and figuring out how to make it more meaningful and engaging for my math anxious students.

We started week 1 with number talks using dot images. We worked on the (modified for 4th grade) shepherd problem from Robert Kaplinsky. We have used Which One Doesn't Belong images.  We have used numerous estimation images, mostly from Ryan Dent's K-2 collection, and put our estimates on a clothesline number line. We have noticed and wondered. And we've done this all in English and Spanish!

Mostly we have spent our first month setting the expectation that everyone can do math. That its ok to make mistakes. That math can (and should!) be fun. I even received feedback from my math coach who joined us one day that I had several students engaged and actively participating who last year never said a peep during math. For me, I'm going to count month 1 as a success. 

Note: Month 1 did not include a paper and pencil assessment. That was thoughtful and purposeful. The tone for math has been set.

This year is going to be a challenge in so many ways, but I'm embracing all the pieces of it.