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.

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.

Geometry Vocabulary

Today we just worked through more word problems, so I figured I would pull out one from the archive. I taught geometry two years ago and decided we needed to cover formulas and definitions for the upcoming final. Each child was provided an 8.5 by 8.5 inch square. Each child was assigned a word that needed an example or picture on white paper and colored paper for an assigned formula. We did vocab speed dating so each child had presented their term to their classmate. The kids seemed to learn a lot and the added perk was that I had a pretty review poster for my classroom.