4/26/07

This week I'm reviewing how to solve equations with my class. It's kind of funny, because when students first see equations, many of them think of the word 'algebra.' Some get scared, some get nervous, and some get excited. Well, this class is made up of the scared and nervous types.

We first looked at equations a week ago, because we needed to get them in before the state testing. I was a little nervous about going back to equations without spending a ton of time walking them through the steps again. But I was very pleasantly surprised!

I put up a simple problem like: 3x + 4 = 19 and asked for a volunteer to come to the board and solve the problem. It was so exciting to see almost every hand in the room shoot up! I chose Michael to come up first. He's really shining lately. This equation stuff makes sense to him, and he's become more confident in his math abilities. He got 100% on the last quiz and the last few entrance or exit slips. When he came to the board, I asked the rest of my class to decide what the first step is, and to check Michael's work as he did the problem. Michael easily solved this problem:

4/19/07

I love having a really small math class! It has helped me so much as a teacher, and I can already see the benefits for the students. As in any classroom, I have one or two students who barely participate, or only participate if they are 100% sure of their answer. But for the most part, the students in this class are starting to get really comfortable with sharing their thoughts.

Yesterday we had an awesome discussion about problem 2.1. This is the problem with Henri and Emile. For the previous few problems, we began by throwing out ideas on how to solve each one. I decided that I would not give students any direction at the beginning of problem 2.1, especially since it's so open-ended. We read it together and then they began on their own.

Since there are only 10 students, I had them work in groups of two, allowing them to choose their own partner. This worked wonderfully, for the most part. There was one group that had trouble figuring out some place to begin, but after they had struggled for a while we discussed the problem, and then they were ready to take off with their own ideas. The other four groups did amazingly well. They used a mixture of strategies to solve the problem. Two groups decided right away to make a graph of the race, and started from there. The third group used a table, and the fourth group used a both a graph and a table.

I was happy to see that Louis and Adam felt confident with the problem and were rocking! They are both resource special education students. Adam is Hispanic and comes from a very supportive family. Louis's parents are also very involved in his education. They are both incredibly hardworking and do well in classes. But both of them have anxiety about presenting in school or answering questions, if they feel they have even the slightest chance of being wrong. Yesterday they did great.

4/12/07

This rotation, the class that I'm teaching has 10 students in it, and half of them are special education students. Our school allows us to schedule and move students around in whatever way our teams want for our "core" learning time. For our team, that means we've got two hours and five minutes before lunch, and two hours and five minutes after lunch. As long as we cover all of the necessary curriculum, we can decide what classes to teach, when we want to teach them, and which students we want in those classes. We decided that some of our students would benefit from having a smaller math class.

The week after ISATs is always interesting. I love to play the game called "how much will my students remember?" Yesterday I was favorably impressed! I had my students pull out their ACE question packets from Investigation 1. (We copy all the ACE questions and put them into a packet for students, so they have easy access.) That's right — we went all the way back to the beginning! We played a review-type game using the dry erase boards for students to write down their work and answers. I pulled some of the ACE questions with more important content for us to review. We did questions 1 and 2 on page 12 in Moving Straight Ahead. All of my students were able to find the walking rates in these problems. But they are still having difficulty with labeling their answers. Only about half of the class labeled their answers. When I asked the others to go back and add labels, they were not able to correctly label their solutions. I took this time to review what the label should be when we are dividing:
___________ per _________________.
The label of the first number per the label of the second number.