After work I rushed over to the district office. We're adopting a new math series next year. The one we have most teachers hate, including me. It's just awful. Anyway, we are allowed to go and preview four math series and vote on the one we want. I'm not sure how much of a say we actually get, but when we did this for our reading series it turned out pretty good. The four series they had for us to preview were McGraw-Hill Math Connects, Houghton-Mifflin Math (this is the company we bought our reading series from), Everyday Math, and the newer version of Investigations (we are currently using the original version of this).
Math Connects looked kinda of cool and this is what I put down for my second choice. It had a lot of support material, technology components and decent assessment pieces. It is something I think I could live with. I put it down as my second choice.
I had my hopes up actually about the newer version of Investigations because I'd heard it's greatly improved. Well, it's improved, but it's still not what I would call a good series. It got my lowest score. From what I heard from the people who were running the show yesterday, it's not gotten any good votes from teachers yet.
Houghton-Mifflin I LOVE the way it looks. It has the same teaching format as our reading series and that REALLY works. I am very much sold on this company and their products. They make it really easy for the teacher, they give you TONS of support materials, their technology components are great, their assessment pieces are complete and they align with state and federal grade level expectations. This got my highest score. I really hope this is what we end up with.
Then, the last one was Everyday Math. Michaela's school uses this so I was curious to look at it. It looks a lot like Investigations, but seems more complete. However, I was not really impressed with the assessment pieces and it really has no technology component. I was a little disappointed because I expected more from it. It was ranked #3 with me.
After that I was really pushing it to get to Michaela's school on time to pick her and Anikca up from choir rehearsal. But, I managed to even have time to have a short conversation with the principal at her school. I like talking to her.
After we dropped Anikca off at home we went and got Caleb. I needed to go get something for a shower gift for a co-worker and needed to get a family movie that I promised to donate to Caleb's school so we went to Walgreen's. When we were finished there it was already 5:30 so we went through the drive through at Taco Bell.
After supper, I went downstairs to make a mini photo album to include in my shower gift. I love doing this. I watched some of Heroes online until it was time for Survivor to come on. Then, all four of us watched Survivor together. I love it that the kids are old enough to enjoy that with us.
When they went to bed, Michael decided to do some work for work. So, I went to the bedroom to watch LOST and talk online with my friend in MN. It's so much fun to be online with her when LOST is on. We get to be shocked and awed and drool over Sayid and Desmond together.
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