Day 33... Love the MTBoS!

I love that I'm a part of a group of amazing math teachers from around the world. On those days where I feel uninspired, I love that I have a plethora of resources at my fingertips. Today, in Intermediate Algebra, we did Dan Meyer's Stacking Cups activity. It was very interesting to see the light bulbs around the room as students understood the slope and y-intercept in relation to the cup.

Day 32... Sort those Shapes!

Students were given a set of cards and asked them to sort by shape. Typically, I do this card sort to introduce the shapes, but due to this week's schedule, I choose to do it after the fact. The conversations weren't as good as I've had in the past, but it still was an effective warmup activity. Then we used the cards to practice writing descriptions and did an exit ticket. All in all, it was a good day :)

Day 31... Foldable Fun

When describing a graph, you need to make sure to include the Shape, Odd Features, Center, and Spread... aka SOCS :)

Day 30...Another failure

Sometimes I do a great job of remembering to take a picture.... Other days, I barely remember to take attendance... Today was one of those days :(

So sorry! Maybe tomorrow will be a better day :)

Day 29... It's a Frog-Flippin' Kind of Day

I love finding fun toys in the Dollar Tree toy aisle! I found this "Frog Pond" game a few years ago and it is such a fun way to gather data! Each student has two minutes to get as many frogs into the pond as possible, then we use the data to introduce dotplots, stemplots, and histograms. Fun! :)

Day 28... Water Displacement

In Intermediate Algebra today, we borrowed some 100 mL graduated cylinders from my neighboring science teacher, added 50 mL of water, then dropped in dice (one at a time) to gather some data. I'm pretty proud of how well the students did today with finding slope when it wasn't a perfect line. The best part was how many of them nailed the exit ticket of "What kind of object would we need to use to create a line with a steeper slope?"

Day 27... AVID Cards

Today during my planning period, my aide worked on these flashcards for our AVID Tutorials. One of the AVID teachers asked me earlier this week about providing the tutors with prompts to help with questioning, so this is my answer to help our teachers/tutors out. I am excited for the teachers to try them out tomorrow!

Day 26... Rule of Four

Today in Intermediate, we used the small whiteboards to work on the Rule of Four. I would give the students one of the representations (Verbal, Equation, Graph, or Table) and they had to create the other three.

Day 25... Videos of Yesteryear

Today we talked about Simpson's Paradox. I used the video clip from the (very old) video series Against All Odds. If you've never seen them, the AAO videos were developed for Public TV back in the 80s and they are VERY dated, but I find it hilarious to see 5.25" floppy disks, etc as if its cutting edge.

Day 24.. I've got nothing...

I forgot to take a picture for today... bummer :(

Please forgive me!

Day 23... M&Ms

I use plain and pretzel M&Ms to introduce contingency tables, marginal/conditional distributions, and segmented bar charts. The students enjoyed working through the assignment and having a snack while they did so. :)

Day 22.. Barbie Time!

Our school has an exchange program with a school in China. Every fall, a dozen students and 2 teachers come to our school. The students stay the entire month of September and the teachers stay through Thanksgiving. Then, in the spring, we send a dozen students and 2 teachers to China for the month of March.

This week, I had the pleasure of working with our Chinese exchange students in predicting the length of a bungee for Barbie to fall off our 2nd floor, which is a total distance of 20 feet. The students really enjoyed gathering data and creating predictions based on their data.

Day 21... MC Cards

Today we practiced some AP Multiple Choice using our "non-techy clickers" :) The students responded very well to them and I REALLY love that they are color coded!

Day 20... Card Sort!

I love using Card Sorts! Today, the kiddos read through several scenerios and decided if the experiment was Completely Randomized, Randomized Block, or Matched Pairs. You can see their foldable/notes in the background as they discuss and sort into piles.

Today was a good day :) I really have some awesome students this year!

Day 19... Exit Ticket

You ever have one of those days where you think... "Holy Moly, it's ONLY Monday!"

Yeah, today was one of those days.... and as such, I didn't take a photo :(

However, I did remember to do an Exit Ticket.. YAY ME! :)

Day 18... Workshop!

I spent all day Friday at a workshop for AVID. Thankfully, it was in my building, so I didn't have to travel far! On the downside, I was MISERABLE... my allergies kicked in and I went through half a box of Kleenex!

AVID is a College-Prep System that teaches students about how to "do" school. A huge part of our curriculum is about Reading and Writing to Learn strategies, including how to conquer the reading of complex texts. I was an elective teacher for 3 years and am in my second year of being our Site Coordinator.

Part of my role as the Coordinator is working with our documentation processes. Since my school also hosted the Tutor Training on Saturday, I woke up bright and early and went to school at 7am on Saturday too. During this time, I went to some of the presentation, then spent the rest of the day in my room working on the documentation. Here is the start of my "Certification Box"...

Don't be fooled... this is just a VERY small part of the documentation! We have 5 2" binders of documentation for the 11 AVID Essentials! :)

Day 17... Experimental Design

The past few days were vocabulary intensive, which doesn't make for the most interesting pictures. However, in this shot you can see several of today's activities... To start class today, we did an AP Free Response, which you can see in the upper left side. Then, we took some notes over the Principles of Experiments in a foldable that you can see in the lower right side of the photo. We followed that up with a Problem Set, which this young person was working on when I snapped the picture. I do have to say that I love how I'm doing homework this year in AP Stat. On a daily basis, students recieve a short problem set of 1-2 problems that pertain to the information we are working on. So far, the kids have really done a great job of taking care of business and doing these on a daily basis.

Day 16... Posters!

Here's where I publicly declare my love for Fawn. :) I pretty much stole her poster project verbatium and you can see some of the results above. I think this task was a good way to make connections between the pictures, the table of values, and the algebraic expression.

Day 15... Patterns Everywhere!

In Intermediate Algebra today, we worked on Fawn's Visual Patterns to introduce linear functions. We are going to do her poster project tomorrow (hopefully). In some ways, I truly love this class, in other ways, it's the most frustrating experience in my career. *sigh*