2/15/07

I made a deal with my students last Friday, but I don't know how well it is going to work out. Their opinion was that math is beginning to follow too much of the same format all the time. For some time now, our regular routine has been to do a warm-up, sometimes go over homework, and launch a problem for them to work on. If it was a relatively short problem, we would summarize it in class; otherwise, the summary was postponed to the next day.

But they were like zombies out there. So last Friday, I had them get up and do some jumping jacks. They know how I love to sing, so we sang a funny song as we did jumping jacks. This little break livened them up. That's when they began to tell me how bored they were by our usual routine. The deal I made was that, if they worked hard on the problem of the day, I would find a way to change things and make math more interesting.

Well, they did work really hard on the problem that day, so I walked in on Monday with the beginnings of a plan. We have just started a new book, and I don't want to stray too much from the way the investigations are written. So I decided to start with something small. Instead of having students write their answers to the ACE problems on the board, or going through the problems with them, we played a game. The game took longer than I had expected, however, because there were a few students who "forgot" to do their homework over the weekend.

2/2/07

Yesterday we gave the Comparing and Scaling pre-tests. We also gave the post-test for this book as a pre-test. The test that Yvette and I created checked our students' prior knowledge about ratios and fractions.

I have graded only eight of the thirteen quizzes so far because, for some reason, five of my students were not in school yesterday. But I am really impressed with what I've seen on the quizzes I graded. About half of my students were able to correctly order fractions, decimals, and percents. All students were able to put most of the numbers in order, but many were confused by the decimal 0.08. Otherwise, they had some trouble finding the percent of a whole. I plan to review some of these ideas with my students as we continue on through the first few investigations of the book.

We just had a meeting to decide about points to grade this test. It was really weird. Last year we must have all decided on our own points for the grading of the post-test. But this year, as a seventh grade, we've decided that we should be as consistent with tests/grading as possible. That way, when we look at the data at the end of the year, we'll be able to compare one another's data.

1/26/07

Yesterday we gave the Stretching and Shrinking post-test. It was a huge success! The 45 students on our team scored only A's, B's, and C's. Most of our students got A's and B's. There were only six C's across the board. Yvette and I are thrilled by the results. The most exciting news is that Michael, the one I have been writing about so much, scored a C on his test - 75 percent! This is a huge accomplishment for him. From what he's told me, I don't think he ever scored as high as a C on a math test before.

One of the ways that we are assessing the whole seventh grade's progress over the year is by analyzing the results of our pre-tests and post-tests for each book. For this grade level, we sat down and created an assessment for each of the five books that we teach. We then give this test twice -- as a pre-test and as a post-test. Last year we all gave the same post-tests, but they didn't give us as much information about student progress. That's because we didn't have anything to compare the results with. This year we can compare pre-test results with post-test results.

This is the first post-test of the year for which all three teams gave the pre-test. I'm interested to see how our information compares with the other teams' information. I'm also very interested in seeing how the post-test scores of our IEP, LEP, and Hispanic students have changed since the pre-test. I wonder whether one group has achieved more than the others. In our school improvement plan, the school identified these three groups as less likely to "meet" on the ISAT.