Well, the idea of keeping a commonplace book has clearly struck a nerve. Not only did the article make the front page of Reddit and blow up on Facebook and Twitter, but many people emailed in their…
November 2015 Procedures of Encounter, or, My Commonplace Log Practice Several years ago I was in a small specialty bookstore and came upon a book with mostly blank pages simply called A Little Com…
I've mentioned my beloved Commonplace Book many times- I love that thing. I think I could lose my wallet and be less stressed than if I lost my Commonplace. I don't do it in any wonderful way- it's just a place where I collect notes and thoughts and quotes and such. Commonplace books aren't anything
ZIbaldone, the word means a heap of things or miscellany in Italian. As a commonplace book, it can be described as a register of continuous learning.
Science topics include mitosis and meiosis. Math activities include slope, slope-intercept, Pythagorean Theorem. Algebra, Pre-Algebra, 7th grade math.
This is my second year using my transformation project as an assessment and I love it! See my previous post here, transformation sum...
"Cheat sheets" always helped me in school. Being a visual learner, they were a quick and easy way to memorize a lot of information in a short amount of time. Here are a list of my favorite
Knowing how to graph trig functions allows you to measure the movement of objects that move back and forth or up and down in a regular interval, such as pendulu
My awesome coworker and I made up a trig matching activity. I know it's not a novel idea, but here is another resource for precalculus teachers to solidify angles in standard position. You can find the file HERE. Via our internet math community, I learned that it's easier to leave one of the pages uncut (the pink sheet here), and then the students can place the matching cut up green and gold cards on the page. Before, I used to cut up all three, and then that took up too much space on the student tables. Thank you virtual PD friends for the great tip. My buddy and I also decided to break up the teaching into 2 class periods with degrees one day and the dreaded radians along with their devilish friends, FRACTIONS (duhn DUHN duhhhhhhn) for the next day. Hopefully, this will allow the fraction/radian goodness to seep into their resisting minds more readily. I didn't share the word document because it seems to mess up when you download it via box.net (or maybe I'm wrong). If you want the word document to play around with, send e-mail. Another thing I like about this is that we didn't use all special angles. We also didn't indicate which was up or down on the pink sheet, so that stumped some kids and they had to think and justify the direction. Yay math.
A big thanks to Amy over at Square Root of Negative One Teach Math for helping me come up with an easy way for students to remember logarit...
OK. I was mildly obsessed over meeting Mr Slope Guy for the first time. I was observing two novice teachers, and they were using Mr Slope Guy as a mnemonic for students in analyzing slope. But I think he could be fated for bigger and better adventures. Since my son Xavier is a budding comic book artist, we put together the following (PDF of the whole comic), with some inking support from Ysabela. The problem was whether MSG was a hero or villain, and he wound up needing to be defeated. He is a personification of algebra. Be interested in your feedback. Only one more thing to say: Marvel, please don't sue! Spider-man is a wholly owned trademark of Marvel, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and starring in a major motion picture this summer.
This past week in class we started my FAVORITE type of math to teach! ALGEBRA!! I'm not sure what I love so much about it, but I just think that the possibilities are ENDLESS with the fun things that you can do with it! I remember when I was in school and was in Algebra-it was book/paper activities ALL. THE. TIME. However, I plan to do some out of the box things this 9 weeks with my Expressions and Equations 6th Grade CCSS. :) So, here is a peek at what I did this past week in class to introduce Expressions and Equations. First, we took some note in our Interactive Notebooks on the difference between Expressions and Equations, vocabulary, the Distributive Property (with Algebra), and did some stick and solves (with post-its). It was hard for the students to grasp the distributive property a little with algebra since we learned about it a little with Number Systems, but with numbers not variables. They got stuck for awhile thinking that you could SOLVE these expressions with a number, so we spent a LOT of time talking about the difference between an expression and an equation. We then got into like terms and combining them. This sparked my higher students to go crazy with this, and all week during enrichment, I spent giving CHALLENGES with maybe 7 terms that had to be distributed to, powers and mixed variables! Even though we got into some CRAZY variables, powers, and combining (7th or 8th grade stuff), they had a BLAST! It really challenged them to understand the process-so I think that it really pushed my higher students! Not to mention they were having FUN---and who wants to stop that? :) We did an Algebraic Expression Mix and Mingle, too. I did it on note cards for now, unless anyone expresses an interest for me to put all of my Mix and Mingle games on Teachers Pay Teachers, then I will make them cute and fancy. :) Just send me a message or comment, First, I made expressions that the students needed to solve using the distributive property: I then also made cards in blue ink that had the answers written on them. The students paired up and were each given a question card and a random, answer card. The pairs of students then worked out the question on their card: Once everyone had worked out their questions, they mingled with each other to try to find the group with their answer card. They had a lot of fun--plus it included an aspect that ALL middle school students LOVE to do---MINGLE! :) The last thing that we got to this past week was translating words into algebraic expressions. Ugh. I was dreading this one because even when I taught math at the community college they struggled with this one. We started with some Pinspired notes in our interactive notebooks: Then we did some practice whole class. That is about as far as we got this week. We did a Mix and Mingle activity with this too. Everyone got a card-some were the words and some were the expressions, and they had to match up the correct words to expression. :) We only have two and a half days this next week of school, and I am planning to have them work on our Thanksgiving Math Centers as a review (shameless plug-they're on sale the rest of today!!!). :) Plus, I have math planning on Monday, so I won't be in the classroom. Have a great week everyone! :)
Pythagoras activities - put posters up around the classroom, students answer on post-its http://t.co/dpTV4avA7H
I have previously blogged about My Color-coded Guided Notes and how much the students love them because they help them see the connections within the concepts. Example of My Students' Guided Notes: Along with color-coding in the students' guided notes, I also create color-coded input wall charts. I coordinate the color-coding to match the students' notebooks. The students find my color-coded input charts really helpful as a quick resource when they are doing their Worthwhile Wednesday Performance Tasks or Team Tasks. Here are some examples of my color-coded input wall charts. Thanks for stopping by and checking out my blog on color-coded input wall charts... :o)
equations of lines interactive notebook pages
Trigonometry is one of my favorite units to teach. It is super visual which is a huge plus for my students. All the problems in this unit are easily tied to real life. And when I say real life, I m…
This post is dedicated to Mor over at A Teacher's Treasure. Last weekend I watched her video on Interactive Student Notebooks (click on the link to check it out for yourself) ... and I was so inspired I knew I couldn't wait to "kick it up a notch" again in my math journals. This was the piece I was missing in my math journals - and before I watched the video I didn't even realize I was missing something. Her interactive student notebooks are based on the right side and left side pages. The students' right side of the notebooks all contain the same information (direct from the teacher). The left side of the notebook contains the students' thinking, knowledge, and reflection on the lesson. She has a terrific resource packed with over 100 templates for "left side of the page thinking". You can see it by clicking here (and it's even on sale right now!). I couldn't wait until September to start using the ideas in her fabulous resource, so we started using her strategies this week. On Monday we were learning about Order of Operations. I took them outside for a fun order of operations hopscotch, then we used the sidewalk chalk to fill the basketball court with problems and solutions. You can read my post about it here. So of course, we needed a foldable to go along with our new knowledge. I needed it to be quick and easy because I wanted to spend time discussing our new "left side" thinking. So, quick and easy it was. We used sticky notes and arranged them in a hopscotch pattern (to tie in our outside activity). Underneath each sticky note was the word for each step (under the "B" was brackets). I added a little extra information (including our learning goal) for them to copy, and that was that. This is the left side of the journals. Students rewrite the learning goal from the right side of the page (in student-friendly language). Then they write "What I Know". We do this before we do the lesson (it's highlighted in green to show that now we can "go" on with the rest of the lesson). After the lesson they write "What I Learned", "Proof" (where I want them to write a problem and solve it), and then a "Reflection" - this one is completely up to them - they can reflect on and show their learning in ANY way they want. This particular student wrote a mnemonic device for memorizing the steps to order of operations. After our test midweek, we started our next unit. This short unit encompasses angles, triangles, and polygons. We started with angles. I wanted to do a fun, interactive element to our journals, so we made angles using two coloured pieces of construction paper cut into arrows, and attached them to our pages with a brass fastener. I had them glue the bottom arrow to the page, leaving the second arrow free to move into whatever angle needed. We practiced how to measure an angle, then I had them create angles of various degrees. The red colour made it very easy for me to see who had the concept right away, and who needed a little extra assistance. We added a foldable underneath our interactive angle tool. It was a three fold foldable. We wrote the titles of the angles on the outside. Underneath each flap we had a diagram of the angle, a definition, and examples from the classroom. The students really enjoyed finding the different examples in the classroom. The students also completed a "left side" for this activity, too. For the reflection, a lot of my students completed a picture of some sort of picture with the different angles labelled. But one of my favourite reflections was this girl who wrote a little song to remember the different angles. I'm so excited about the evolution of my math journals!!! My mind is already swimming with ideas for next year. Thank-you SO much, Mor! Happy Sunday!!! Interactive Math Journal Interactive Math Journal 2 Building Better Math Responses Math Concept Posters InLinkz.com
5 key reasons to teach students to analyze differing perspectives
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Pairing the sharp observations of Twitter users with Charles Schulz's beloved comic strip characters makes for wicked humor.
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