1/19/07

The Stretching and Shrinking lessons are coming to an end, and I am sitting here trying to figure out whether my students have learned what I wanted them to learn. Yesterday, my teammate Yvette and I gave a quiz as a checkup on investigations 1, 2, 3, and 4. The grades from this quiz are all over the board. I have three A's, four B's, three C's, one D, and one F. Yvette has similar results. The question now is: Did the students learn all of the essential concepts? I know that the ones who received A's and B's do understand the essential concepts. However, I don't think that the students in the C range understand the essential concepts.

Our quiz covered these skills:

1. Characteristics of similar figures
2. Using scale factor to find the perimeter and area of a
   new figure
3. Using ratios to evaluate whether figures are similar
4. Equivalent ratios
5. Finding scale factor from a larger to a smaller figure,
   and vice versa
6. Finding missing side lengths
7. Using rules to create similar figures on coordinate grids

The students who struggled the most on this quiz had the most trouble with these two questions:

1. How do you use scale factor to determine whether a figure
   stretches or shrinks?
   
   1. Stretches: _______________________________
   2. Shrinks: _________________________________
2. Which of the following rectangles is similar to a 10 by 15 rectangle?

Obviously, these were not the only questions that these students did not understand/answer correctly.

12/22/06

This year, my team has an intern named Kim. Kim has been with us for about eight weeks now, and her time with us is ending next week. I know this doesn't sound particularly math-related, but I have learned so much over the weeks I've worked with her. As a second-year teacher, I wasn't sure how much I would really be able to help Kim. I am still trying to figure out the best way to present new information, manage my classroom, and efficiently get through lessons. Working with Kim really helped me to think about these things and reflect on my own teaching.

Earlier this week, Kim was teaching lesson 4.1 in Stretching and Shrinking. We had already sat down together and discussed the most important parts of the lesson, as well as the best way to present the information. In this lesson there is a picture of a girl holding a cardboard fish, and examples of the fish being resized. Students use ratios within the figure (height/width) to decide which figures are similar. I was observing Kim and the class as she was teaching the lesson. There were a lot of things that I thought I would do differently, or that I noticed were not a necessary part of the lesson. I am not writing this as an evaluation of my student teacher, but it was kind of an "aha!" moment for me. I realized that I have a better understanding of the material than I sometimes give myself credit for. I have been struggling to make sure that I hit the important information and don't spend too much time on unnecessary information.

12/15/06

Two weeks into Stretching and Shrinking, and we're going strong. It amazes me that my students have days when their brains are exploding with knowledge, and other days when they do not appear to understand anything that is going on.

Last Friday, my teammate Yvette brought her class into my room for a special performance. Her class came to sing a special song about the Wump family. For some reason, our students have been very enthusiastic about learning about the Wumps and their family's rhyming names. Yvette's class sang: "My Wumps, my Wumps, my Wumps, my Wumps, my lovely lady Wumps." Our students LOVED this. Every day my students sing this song at the beginning of class. We sing one verse, and then the students are ready to go.

On Monday, my class was working on problem 2.2, in which students use five rules to change the coordinate pairs for Mug's Hat. In both of my math classes, 98% of students were able to apply the rules and correctly graph the figures. As one of the summarizing parts of this lesson, we created a chart that summarized how a rule will affect the movement of a point or a figure on a coordinate grid.

As they did this exercise, my students were exploding with brainpower. They seemed to anticipate what questions I would ask, and they were ready with a response.
This is the chart we created: