Day 59... What a fun day!

What a fun day!

Today we worked on residual plots. The students were mostly working independently, so they used their Green/Yellow/Red cups to help alert me to issues or questions as they occurred. During this part of the day, they had a card sort of matching scatterplots and residual plots, which generated some great discussions.

For the last 30 minutes or so of class, we spent time doing Quiz Quiz Trade as a review. If you've never used this activity, I definitely recommend it! :)

At the end of the day, I worked with my science teacher partner and learned how to mount a slide and use a microscope... it was AWESOME!:) Yay for great days! :)

Day 58... APSTATSGUY

I don't have the opportunity very often to show a video in math, so when I was lesson planning on how to best teach the coefficient of determination, I started scouring the web for ideas. I ran across this video on YouTube. My students enjoyed his enthusiasm and I hope they had a better understanding after this explanation :)

Day 57... Case of the Missing Laundry

First, let me give a shout-out to Fawn Nguyen... I totally have a Math Teacher Crush on Fawn! She's one of those awesome teachers that I hope to someday be more like! Today's activity comes from this post on Fawn's blog.

In Intermediate Algebra, we've been working on Distance = Rate * Time problems. When I read Fawn's post, I knew I could use the Case of the Missing Laundry, but really feared that my students would be on information overload on the way the problem was originally written. In addition, I wanted my students to use D=RT, not graphing (yet), so I knew I needed to delete the last part of the problem. To help scaffold the Case, I separated each suspect into its own clue and only gave students one page at a time. At the end of the 6 clues, they had enough information to determine who had stolen Mrs. Murphy's laundry. Overall, I think it went pretty well and my students seemed to enjoy the puzzle/mystery aspect of the problem.

Day 56... Stations :)

I love Station activities! One of the best things I ever purchased for my classroom was a set of acrylic frames. I now have them in both portrait and landscape formats and use them as often as I can! I felt my students needed a bit more practice on all of the content we learned last week, so today we did some review work. When I do a stations activity, I make 2 sets of 4 stations since I have 8 groups in my classroom. The kids rotate between the four stations, which gives them a good variety of practice during a class period.

Day 55... Regression Line Practice

Today we spent some time practicing on calculating slope and y-intercept using summary statistics, writing equations, interpreting slope and intercept, and using the LinReg feature on our calculators. Busy day! :) You can see in the photo above that we still have a bit of work to do....

Day 54... Collaboration Time!

We had a late start day for teacher collaboration. The science teacher and I had some time today to work on the Forensic Science and Data Analysis class that we are starting in January. We figured out the units that we will be teaching and started on the first unit of study. I'm so pumped about this class!

Day 53... Twisted Words

Today we started Linear Regression, so the students gathered data on tongue twisters. They time how long it takes to say the tongue twister up to 8 times. I love this lab because it always causes some giggling fits, but it also gives some very linear data and is a great introduction to what the slope really means.