Sand in the City!

As you can see there are some gifted people who can sculpt sand. I believe these were local businesses who took a day to sculpt different things. My favorite it the elephants, toothbrush and toothpaste, sea turtle, and the girl floating on asparagus. This event was held downtown Oregon. They also had puppet shows to bring awareness to issues such as drug abuse, suicide, etc.

Also in downtown they city had these decorative water fountains with sculpted animals. You see the cubs and bear along with the deer and fauns.

I will give a reward for anyone who can identify this unique Oregon tree. Those look like potatoes don't they? Well, they were found hanging on the tree. The leave looks similar to an oak tree. I've contacted a guy from Oregon State University to help me identify it. I jokes on the award.

Now, about the math conference. It was great! It was a great review of things I already knew or forgot. I realized I've taken a role in the classroom that I don't want to do anymore. "I'm the only teacher." I think I had a lot of pride and didn't use my students to help teach me or the other students to the extent I wanted to. I also want to teach quite a bit differently in Math and hopefully in other subjects. Instead of telling the kids the concepts they need to know instead of letting them discover them on their own using manipulatives and more visuals. I learned that telling is not teaching. I'm not sure what made me get into the mindset of "I'm the boss." when I was taught in college the other way I described to you above. I also learned I'm not a risk taker in the classroom and the math curriculum is focused on letting kids take risks by explaining their thinking processes about the answer. That is also something is new to me also because in my years of school it was always focused on getting the right answer and never on the process of how I got there. My math education was also not based on using visuals and manipulatives to discover math concepts it was worksheets and memorization. This will be a very interesting to see how this math curriculum works. I'm excited to see how the kids are going to be thinking but a lot of patience is going to be needed to have me wait for them to put into words what they are thinking. I'm very thankful the District paid for everything on this trip and allowed me to go to grow in a subject that is my weakest.