Elections made relevant

I'm sorry for posting this so late, but I realized that I need to teach something related to the elections taking place tomorrow or my lesson will fall flat tomorrow.  So how will I use math in the elections?  Data is live right now, so depending on when a student looks at a state will determine their outcome, especially for swing states.  We're going to use the information gathered from the exit polls .  My kids will do the math to show why each red state is red and each blue state is blue.  How?  We will multiply break down the votes by gender first.  Then, we will calculate the numbers for the two main candidates.  They will then color each state based on their findings.  We will then compare our maps to the one posted on social media.  We may even compare the maps of the different news stations and discuss the skews in data.  I will also want to prompt questions in regard to outliers and information that can skew the overall data collected (ie. voters that supported other candidates, the third party candidates, etc.)  I hope it turns out okay.  I will probably update this post with feedback in case you have school on Tuesday and would like to use this lesson. 

Compound Inequalities

My students only worked on compound inequalities that shaded between the two points if it was a "and" inequality and outside the two points if it was an "or" inequality, but I felt that it was misleading.  My kids had recently mastered no solution and all real numbers in the previous section, so why should it not carry through to compound inequalities.  I felt like I had misled them if I didn't show them other compound results.

First, we started off with a review sheet, I had noticed that some kids were struggling.  Thank goodness all my classes had an even number today otherwise my plan may have had more kinks.  There were four sections on the worksheet I had in class.  The first part was just interpreting the graphs.  The kids chose their best friend as their partners as usual.  Before moving to the next section, they had to find another partner.  Typically my low level students don't work with a higher level  math student in fear that someone may find out that they can't solve the equation.  This forced my levels to mix by the third and fourth round.  Haha, math teacher won out.  The kids worked the hardest they have worked in a while.  I praised them and then threw in the monkey wrench...

I started with the statement "Raise your hand if your grandmother is older than 50 years old."  Then, I said "continue to raise your hand if your grandmother is older than 50 and younger than 10."  I had a few "what?!" faces, but the hands quickly went down as I began to explain a no solution equation.

For all real numbers, I asked them to raise their hands if they were older than 14.  Then, I said raise your hand if you are older than 15 or younger than 17.  They all raised their hands.  This was an example for all real numbers, I begin to see ah-ha faces.

We'll see after their homework tonight if they grasped the two concepts.

Hello Kitty graph and a new website

New teacher blog to check out.  Mrs. Hoppe has awesome activities for students to work on from algebra tiles to review games to projects on graphing.  She has awesome ideas that I hope to infuse into my class this year.  You can link to her blog here.

My kids will be graphing soon so after their test yesterday on inequalities, they worked on a graphing activity from Mrs. Hoppe's website.  It turns out to be Hello Kitty so it is super cute, but they also showed me if they could graph or not.

Puzzle builder

I had forgotten about this program until searching on pinterest for algebra 1 activities.  This was a great activity you can use for any topic and any subject.  I plan on changing it a bit because some of my lower level students may have needed part of the puzzle to be solved for them.  Basically, you choose the number of questions you want to be solved based on the puzzle.  Then, you type the question and solution into the input category.  It produces a table of the questions and answers, along with a key for the puzzle.  Awesome activity.  I was able to walk around the classroom more today, than on others.  Tarsia is the name of the program and it is a free download!

Multi-Step activity

So my students will need tons of practice on this section.  Previous to our quiz today, I had the students walk around the class and answer each question of the set of 8.  Once they have solve a problem, they find the card matching the solution.  They should complete all 8 problems.  If they didn't solve all 8, then they need to revisit their work.  If they can't find their answer, they need to revisit their work.

I send them in groups of three or four depending on the size of the class, so there isn't a pile up.  If class all end up at the same equation, I may sit them down in groups and allow them a "runner" to get the next equation.  I'll post an update on it later today, since I didn't share any goodies yesterday.

Order of Operations Bingo

First I need to give credit to the blog Math Equals Love, Ms. Hagan has been such an inspiration to me starting an interactive notebook in my classroom.  We used her printable for PEMDAS today and the kids really seemed to understand the left to right concept better in the visual organizer.  I will reference her materials tons this semester!  

Tomorrow we will be playing Order of Operations Bingo, I decided to add a bit of a twist to the lesson provided by NCTM.  I decided I would let the kids come up to the board and select a number to solve, then they would mark it out on their bingo card.  If anyone knows how to limit a hyperlink to one click, please let me know.  Originally I was going to use shapes instead of numbers for the hyperlinks, but I couldn't figure out how to make the shapes disappear.  If you have a smart-board let students toss a sock at the board to choose the next problem.  Unfortunately my kids have to use the pen, so I had a different number than the answer for each problem.  My first five kids to win bingo will receive 25 tickets to place in the drawing on Friday in hopes of getting one of the 4 homework passes.