Beginning of the year review

We know as math teachers this is a vital time in our classroom.  To have an effective school year, we need to know the strengths and weaknesses of our students.  I always begin my school year without calculators.  I know insert the shock face here.  But I need to know how many of the basics are my students missing.  I have seniors that still don't know how to add and subtract integers.  I will be addressing how I hope to use my one-to-one classroom to help these students out in my class in a later blog.  So what do I review with my intermediate Algebra 1 students?

Identifying Real Numbers

I begin the notes with Math = Love's Real number chart.  I like it better than the circles, for some reason my kids get it better this way.  Then we move into the matching activity in class.  I use the one from the State of Virginia, but there is another on TpT in Jean Adams page.  From here we do a sorting worksheet for homework and some of the graphing from the sheet for classwork.  The next day we review and we then take a short quiz.

Adding Integers

Most students struggle with this at the high school when they come to us from the middle school.  I really make this my goal to make these rules stick.  I make plus/minus tiles as a manipulative.  The picture below shows an example of -3 + 5.  By lining up the ones that cancel out, it is easy for students to see the answers.  I also use the "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" song for integers.

Differentiated Quizzes

Normal

Guided take one

Early I had addressed my problem with my lower level students on their quiz and a few of my top fliers as well.  So I feel like my second time around was much better.  I even used this method on the test.  I broke the problems down to find the misconceptions.  I sometimes have to scale back because I want my students to solve the most difficult of problems and they just don't have the capability because they don't understand how to solve a part of the equation.  All of my students seemed to benefit from the more broken down quiz.  I will come back and post links to the quizzes later in case you would like a copy

The new updated versions:

Normal

Broken down

Differentiated Quizzes

Guided quiz

So one of my goals this semester is to differentiate all of my quizzes.  Through classwork and other pre-assessments, I determine which students are still struggling with the concept and which students have mastered the topic.  This way I can see if the child understands the concept or parts of the concept.  I want to know exactly where they went wrong.

Normal quiz ( the 100s on this one gave me some comfort that it had been taught)

I need to re-work my multi-step equations quiz.  After multiple low grades on the last quiz, I have been racking my brain on how to improve the quiz/their learning.  So instead I figured I would open it up for suggestions.  I knew that some students were struggling to grasp what was being distributed in the problem, so I have covered distribution yet again.  I even gave points for highlighting like terms correctly, but I still think it may need to be a bit more guided.  What would you suggest?