Hook for Transformations: Desmos

First, let me warn you that these challenges are super consuming and you will lose an entire class period.  Desmos.com was a happy accidental find on twitter and I am now hooked!  A way to teach transformations and to make students allow room for error.  There were a few that I will admit I gave up on in the middle of trying to find the answer, so I do recommend going through them all and then assigning a few for a class.  This is super fun!  I could see my students discussing what they did to arrive to their answer and hopefully being able to take the adjustments and creating postulates for math.  I love any time my students get sucked into an activity.  This is why I have opened up a donorschoose page for fire tablets this time.  In hopes to bring technology into my classroom for activities like this.  I need to explore some more, but I encourage you to do the same and share your experiences.  Best part...it is free!  So explore away. 

System of Equations: Substitution

I absolutely despise teaching my lower level students the substitution method.  But the state always puts a question on the state test about the elimination and substitution methods.  Does anyone else feel this frustration?  I tend to want to jump straight to the calculator for graphing and using matrices.  But in an attempt at tutoring the other day, I had a moment of genius strike!  It inspired a creation of a worksheet...to be shared at a later date.  Note cards served their purpose in class that day.

I made the student flip the card to the other side every time he crossed the equal sign.  He said it was still a lot of work.  You know because our students are professional whiners at times, but he said it did make more sense after doing several problems like this.  Will he more than likely solve systems using a different method?  Yes, but will he recall this activity with this method?  Yes.  For some more eye candy, I have posted my latest notebook additions below.  The yellow chart came from Holt McDougal's powerpoint.

Christmas Time Again!

I had a bit of a hiatus from my blogging, but I am ready to move forward full steam ahead.  Christmas is one of my favorite holidays.  I enjoy decorating, baking, gift wrapping, and giving.  This time of the year I try to give back to my community as much as possible.  Tomorrow, we will graph at least 10 linear equations with labels to make Christmas/Holiday cards.  If they don't have anyone to send it to, we will send them to the local veterans for Christmas.  Below are two examples, I really hope they like doing these.  I did not get to designing the Haunted houses with linear equations this year, so this was a great use of linear equations.

 

Spring Break

It has been a while since I have posted, so I have a few goodies that I plan to share in the next few days to catch you up on the activities that were considered successes.  The first one was how I dealt with students who would rather talk about Spring Break plans than do work.  Kids on the day before any long vacation are not at their prime for learning.  Keeping this in mind, I created a review egg hunt.  The problems were scattered around the room/hidden and they had to try and find them to solve.  When they completed the question, I asked them to put it in a new location to keep the hunt a little more exciting. They did well for the review considering domain and range is sometimes a challenging section.  Also, some of the eggs were silly note the back of the red egg in the picture.

Next, I used a graphing activity from math aid.  We were going into a graphing unit next, so I used it to see who could graph and who could.  They turned out to be cute and added color to my walls.

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.