Algebra 1: Unit 4

More of the picture dump mentioned here.

Lots of ideas taken and tweaked from here.
And a general side-note, basically every post I do should say "taken and tweaked from....*somewhere awesome online*...." but I figure you all understand that by now, it's what teachers do!! :)

Distance-Time sorting activity!

Writing Equations booklet

Slope-Intercept Form impromptu pages. 

They were really struggling with this (mostly because I breezed past it thinking they were fine and they definitely were not fine!) so we did a sorting activity for reinforcement.

TMC14

Well, it's official!!!!

I am going to TwitterMathCamp!!!!

**squeal**

I'm so excited to get to learn some awesome ideas from some awesome teachers. 

It's also going to be so fantastic to meet real, three-dimensional people that I'm used to following on twitter and chatting with.

I'm ecstatic!

If you want to sign up go to bit.ly/registerTMC14

In other news...

I'm going to be uploading a lot of pictures soon of units and notebooks pages.

One of my weak areas right now is detailing my lessons and reflecting on them through my blog. I do that personally right now, just not publicly with you wonderful people. 

It's not at all that I don't want to, it's just at time issue right now.

I am committed to improving.

That just takes time. Hmmmm... :/

Anyway.

Rather than continue to be MIA for weeks on end because I simply do not carve out enough time to fully share my lessons and reflections, I've decided to just picture dump on you more and release myself from the guilt about not explaining more. Pictures are helpful without words, right? At least a little?

One main factor in this decision is that I've received more and more emails lately that all sound similar.

"Do you have any notebook pages or ideas about _______"

My usual response: "Yes! And I'd love to share those with you! I'll do a blog post soon."

So, I've decided to upload lots of pictures. Maybe they will be helpful to some people. Maybe not. 

Then someday I'll post more details about the lessons :)

deal?

UPDATE:
Picture dump pages! :)
here
here
here
here
here

Snow Day #10

Yes #10.
Yes it's only Feb. 4th.
Yes I would love to work on my wedding anniversary of June 13th.
NOT!!!!!!

Ah well, might as well enjoy wearing sweat pants and sipping my coffee and this view :)

We have been working on Systems of Equations in regular 8th grade math and I think it's finally starting to all click. My students had most of the ideas, but it wasn't all coming together to form the larger picture I wanted. We still have some work to do when we get back to school to make sure everything is wonderfully clear in their minds! More on that later...

For now, I want to tell you about something happening on my couch in about 3 hours. I will have lots of lovely students logged into a Cover It Live chat discussing systems of equations. SQUEAL!!!!! I have never before utilized the technology available to teachers like I am doing this year. Most of my students and parents are signed up in a cell in one of my classroom Celly groups. I have become a new believer in Celly over the last two days!

On Sunday evening, after school had been cancelled for Monday, I sent a missing assignment email to each parent about what specific things their students needed to work on. Yes, I was making them work on math during their snow day. Snow day #10 mind you. They've had plenty of time to sled by now!! Also, these were not new assignments. These were overdue/missing/late assignments. No guilt!! :) Anyway, I reminded parents in this email that Celly was a great option if their students needed help. Since then... Celly explosion! I have been answering questions left and right while I sit on my couch and watch three entire seasons of Downton Abbey and Mike and Molly :)

Yesterday there were lots of great questions being asked and I decided "Hey, why not have a chat event?!" So this morning I sent out a Celly message to all parents and students saying that I would be hosting a Cover It Live event from 2-3pm today. I have already received multiple responses saying students will be in attendance! YIPPEE!!!! Now, let me not get ahead of myself. Lets hope they actually show up and it's actually a glorious time of math discussion. Even if it's not, I'm pushing myself to try new things!

Now, please don't hear me wrong throughout this post,
I am not tooting my own horn!

I want to encourage your to try something new this year! Utilize more technology than you have in the past! Trash or scrap something that isn't working. For me, that was Piazza with my regular students. My Pre-AP still love the heck out of Piazza but not my regular kiddos this year. That's okay. We're going a different direction. I'm trying Celly and Cover It Live. Maybe this will be their cup of tea.

If I can do it, you can do it!!

Let's embrace this new technological world and make the most out of it! Without it, I wouldn't be preparing for a fun math chat on this cold and snowy snow day. Get out there and change the world - you can do it!!

UPDATE:
My Cover It Live session was a great success!! I had a great discussion with seven students, and my cover it live meter said I had a few additional "viewers" which I'm guessing are students that were just following along and didn't want to say much - fine by me! I'm leaving our conversation online for students to continue to view. In case you want to see, it's here. I also received some awesome parent feedback. Here are two:

Caleb is so excited about this help in your tutorial session!  Thank you very much for setting this up for your students!!!! You are awesome:)

Omg....best teacher ever!!

Take heart teachers, our good work gets noticed. There are parents out there saying the same things about YOU!!!! :) What you do matters!!

Algebra 1: Unit 2

Here's your visual tour of my Unit 2.

Unit Overview

This is what the "What I need to remember on my retest" looks like.

Since my district uses common assessments my students are not allowed to take their exams out of the classroom. We use a reflections page similar to this one shown for each unit to write reminders and study notes that students take home with them. 

An updated version of THIS page from last year.

The blank boxes on the right side were for partner practice problems like the ones shown here.

Inside the "How to Calculate and Approximate a Decimal" foldable.

Not-so-fantastic Exponents foldable.

Students worked through the following two pages with teams.

Once they were comfortable with their own rules and generalizations, we wrote the names of the rules on the front of the two folded pages.

And we wrapped up with radicals.

YOUR COPIES:

Unit 2 Overview

Calculating a Decimal foldable

Laws of Exponents investigation

the Simplifying Radicals Maze idea is from here

Math Workshop

Not all students are created equal. Yes, we all know that. I try to differentiate my instruction but let's be honest, this is not my forte'. It's very challenging. My class is usually run whole-group style with instruction designed for the average kids. It's bulk, mass market education. And, honestly, it's working somewhat effectively. Good test scores... increased achievement... blah blah blah. But I'm not satisfied. I feel like there are kids who are confused or bored or not challenged or challenged too far or who never ask questions or fill in the blank that are basically falling through the cracks. They are getting a decent education. But I feel like I could give them a better education.

Do you feel like I'm leading up to something here? You little detective, you!!

Well... here's the new idea... MATH STATIONS!

***wooooooo!!! cheers!!! the crowd goes wild!!***

Wait, why are you not cheering? What? Educators have been doing this for years and calling it "math workshops?"
Gasp.

I know, I know, the math workshop model is not revolutionary anymore. People are using it all over the place. But, from my research, mostly with elementary age kiddos. I want to try it with 8th grade math and pre-ap Algebra 1. There are fewer resources out there for this level! Also, the mathematics is more rigorous and 15 minutes every other day will simply not do to adequately teach the concepts I need to teach.

But my kids deserve better. They deserve to have small group time to get their questions answered and really be heard. So, after much research, deliberating, and discussing with other awesome math educators, I'm going to try to implement math workshops.

Here's my current plan. Feedback on this one would be FANTASTIC!
I need all the help and ideas I can get.

On the first day back from winter break I'm going to ask each student to fill out the following:

They will rate the jobs and then I will review all the papers and create groups. There is also a section (not in the picture above) that asks students to list five classmates with whom they work well. They are also asked to explain why they work well together, not just "we're friends" type stuff. I have also given them the opportunity to tell me two classmates they do not work well with and why. I'm hoping that using their input I can create some teams that work well and they also feel comfortable working with.

LINK TO FREE WORD FILE

Here is how I see rotations going.

I am not comfortable yet with the idea of only having "instructional" time for one 15-20 minute station every other day (I teach on block schedule) so I made each group have teacher time for two stations. :) This will allow me to have half of the class with me (12-14 students) while the other half is working through two rotations. One will be MobyMax where they will log in and work through prior concepts that they are weak on. The second will be Practice & Quiz time. This will be where students do practice problems (homework) with their team, work on tasks, and take concept check quizzes (moving towards SBG). I will be using the 6 laptops I got through my school's one-to-many grant for the MobyMax station.

I have created a powerpoint with an embedded shockwave flash timer from online stopwatch. I love using online stopwatch in class and wanted a way to display each groups current station while showing a countdown timer so students can monitor themselves on timing. 

Here's an example of the first slide. I can input the time and then the timer will count down while students can still see where each group should be. When the timer goes off I will advance the slide to show the next rotation and retest the timer. Repeat...repeat...

If all goes according to plan (none of those unscheduled fire drills please!), by the time students are done with each class period they will have had 35 minutes learning a new concept and creating notebook pages with me, 17ish minutes working through old skills that they need to polish up on, and 17ish minutes requizing concepts, working on tasks, playing a fluency game, etc. 

Alright... there's the current plan. What are your thoughts???

UPDATE!!!!!!

I have run stations in my classroom on numerous occasions. I do them for review, gallery walks as teams for multiple representations, and other times as well. In the above post, I'm talking about converting my entire classroom model. We will meet in stations like the ones outlined above daily. This will be how class runs on a normal basis. There will be different days, of course, there always are, but Math Stations will be the norm. 

Hope this helps some of the confusion.

Algebra 1: Unit 1

Yes this was from back in August--September. I'm just now getting to it. Kind of... Alright, full disclosure, I don't love some of the things in my Algebra 1 interactive notebook this year. I feel like I could have done better and they're sub-par from time to time. But I guess that's the reality of teaching. I'm glad I'm looking at myself and my profession critically. That's a positive way to approach it, right? :)  I have gone back and forth so many times about sharing these pages or not. I don't love them. They're not life-changing. Oh well. Sometimes that's the best we've got, right? I decided to go ahead and share these because I like when other teachers share their not-so-brilliant moments. It makes me feel more okay about mine, ya know?

Without further ado...

We started Unit 1 refreshing some accelerated 7th grade ideas of sampling, biased data, and representing data. We did a Lucky Charms investigation. Yours is HERE if you want a copy.

We discussed the ideas of more precision with larger samples, random vs. biased, relative frequency, precision in plotting, and estimating predictions. We then recorded all of our heights and shoe sizes, separated by boys and girls.

The "Our Data" page flips open so that when you turn to other pages of the notebook the data is still visible. This came in handy when we created dot plots, box plots, and histograms on the next pages. It's also getting ready to come in handy again when we use this same data to talk about correlation, scatter plots, lines of best fit, and residuals in Unit 5.

Here's our plots on the next page. See... super handy that students could see the data and also these pages at the same time. Saved lots of time and headaches not flipping back and forth and losing our place over and over.

We then did a Standard Deviation Investigation.

Yours is HERE if you want a copy.

We summarized in our notebook and complete the practice pages that are taped in. I don't remember exactly where I got the practice page, possibly Teachers Pay Teachers. Or maybe a blog link through Twitter. I'm so sorry to whoever deserves credit for the practice activity. It's about five different cars and fuel efficiency. If it's your activity please leave a comment or email me, I'd love to give you credit!

We also did a couple days on Two-Way Tables but I didn't do notebook pages on them. Can you tell I love them? Ha! **oozes sarcasm**
If you want either Investigation or Homework, they are linked.

Lastly we wrapped up by summarizing vocabulary. I don't usually devote much page space to vocabulary since students build a glossary at the end of their notebooks, but this unit was just too vocab-rich to avoid it. Students referenced this more often than I thought and it has proven useful.

Well, there you have it. My Algebra 1 Unit 1 that I don't completely love.

This is definitely a unit that I'd LOVE to see how you approach these topics; I need some new ideas!

8th Grade Math: Units 3 and 4

Here is a picture dump! I'll try to compile a list of original resources that I borrowed from and then share what I can. But for now, a pictographic story of my interactive notebook for units 3 and 4.

I have added a few, quick notes about particular times under the photos.

The "Remember on my Retest" pages is a blank organizer that lists each objective on our test. Students fill out reminders to themselves about what to study as they make corrections to their original test. For more on retesting my classroom, see my post here.

The large, block letters on the right side of the page were a coloring activity. Students colored it just like a coloring book - in 8th grade. Yep... most of them loved it!!

The picture below is the "from points/from a graph" foldable open.

The cards on the right were a matching activity. Students worked to match a graph, table of values, equation, slope value, and y-intercept value. They stapled their matches all together and taped them in.

 --card sorting activity--

Desmos investigation. More info can be found here.

Students wrote their names in block letters and identified the types of slope for each section of their names.

The inside of the slope foldable is shown below.

The above was a small matching activity. Some of the graphs and scenarios were lose and students had to match them to the ones already given. It really made them look at and examine axes.

That's all for now!! :)

UPDATE!
Here are all the files. There are TONS since we did a lot of pages and a lot in class. I've included all the editable word/publisher files as well as the pdf version to preserve formatting and fonts. Use whatever you want!