Deep In the Heart of Texas Blog Hop

Hello y’all! My name is Jennifer Smith-Sloane (aka 4mulaFun). I am a born and raised Texan and have lived in several different places although many in the same local area. I was born in Dallas and lived in (small-ish) suburb called Rowlett for the majority of my life. I started college in Abilene before moving off to Commerce. Once I graduated I moved to Garland and settled there for awhile. I spent a stint of time in Austin and miss it terribly. My husband and our three dogs now live in Arlington where we are renting a home while he is working on his Associates degree in Nutrition. We aren’t sure where we will eventually settle but for now we are enjoying life.

Being that I have only lived in Arlington for less than a year the best thing about my town is that I am right in the middle of it all! We are roughly 30 minutes from Dallas and Fort Worth so it makes it really easy to get up and go somewhere to do something. I am also about 45 minutes from my parents and then only 20 minutes from my awesome cousins! Arlington (and even Mansfield) really are awesome towns and I would love to call this home forever!

While I am all about interactive learning in my classroom and LOVE using Interactive Notebooks, my favorite lesson of all is when I get to see my students communicating the language of math! Yes, any time they are using their vocabular words CORRECTLY it makes me swoon! This was part of the reason behind me creating Solve and Snips (R).Not only was I getting my students to problem solve and self-check as they were going but they were discussing with their neighbors how they solved a problem and thus they were using the terms they had learned during the lesson. Be still my heart!

 

Since 2010 I have used Interactive Notebooks in my classroom. I absolutely fell in love with them as I grew in my learning about them and started to REALLY use them correctly. To help save my sanity when it came to assembling and creating flippables for my classroom, I created a set of templates that I could use over and over again but also had simple and easy steps that I didn’t need to repeat. My steps are: Cut on the DASH and fold on the BOLD! Yep, that easy!

I loved creating the templates that I have readily available at any time and my FAVORITE FREEBIE right now is my Editable Matchbook Template that you can grab in my store. It is simple and easy to use and perfect for so many things.