CHAMPS and some questions!

I know this is a bit late, but as promised, here are the photos of my CHAMPS posters that are on my walls in my class room.  If you haven't read about the purpose of these posters, please go here.

I absolutely love the way these have turned out!  It was so worth the time and effort to cut the letters out with my Cricut and have the Mr. painstakingly glue them down for me.  He did most of the grunt work while played worked on my machine.  We had to cut them in half (about the M) to laminate them.  Then we taped it back together on the back.  You can barely tell it was split in half.  I do need to make one regarding coming in to the classroom and getting started on writing assignments, doing the bell ringer, and problem of the week/estimation jar....when I find time.

I also have two new owl additions to my stash.

 Please say hello to Mr. Owl Scentsy! He is my new desk BFF.  My fellow 6th grade math teacher is a consultant and told me on August 30th that this little guy was the Scentsy of the Month.  She didn't have to tell me twice!  I also ordered six scents, five to keep at school, and a new one for at home that the Mr. liked.

My next addition?

 A lovely little owl ring who is my personal buddy.  He was given to me by one of my students.  Isn't he adorable?  I keep him in one of my desk drawers after school so that I won't forget to wear him to school.  I'm not one for a lot of jewelry, but how could I ever resist?

Now for some teachery stuff, I have been working with my kids on equivalent fractions and decimals the past three weeks.  It amazes me how many of them do not know their multiplication facts!  I know we as teachers are trying to stay away from just drilling math concepts, but we need to find a balance because these kids waste so much time using their fingers and adding by the number to find factors and divisors.  I have to keep telling myself to be patient because it's not entirely my students' faults they don't know them.

So starting next week I am doing 90 second drills and I already have a motivator for my friends who I know won't have much motivation.  They will have to write the fact families we are studying 10 times each every day during intervention until they get them down.  This has to happen now because fractions are a huge part of sixth grade and we dive deeper into factors and prime factorization in unit two.

On a side note, I do have a couple questions for you veteran teacher buddies out there:
1.  If you teach math in the upper grades, how do you teach fraction concepts to your students?
2.  For those lovely teachers that have more than one classes worth of assignments to grade, how do you manage that?  As far as the time it takes to grade and deciding what you do take for a grade?  I have around 100 students and I am required to take at least 14 grades per six weeks.  That generally two-three assignments a week.

Speaking of grading, I should probably stop procrastinating and get to it.  Grades are due Tuesday morning for progress reports and I have two stacks of assignments to grade and more coming in with tomorrow's assignments....Can't you tell I am so enthusiastic about grading?  :)