Bringing the Fun and Differentiation into the Classroom... The Vanguard Way!!!

November... Already?!?! This year has been flying by and it's probably due to the good old saying "Time flies when your having fun!"

In October we covered Equations and Inequalities:

My math partner and I continue to ask ourselves while planning... How can we make this fun for the students so that it remains forever in their teenage minds? Our innovative way of teaching this was by bringing in shaving cream into the classroom. Students got their hands messy and were able to practice their equation/inequality solving skills by using shaving cream as their whiteboard. Everyone was having a blast which prevented students from becoming upset or quitting when a step or two were done incorrectly. They were able to simply spread more shaving cream and correct the mistakes. You can definitely guess that when it came to the unit exam students felt confident and they were truly successful!

They have begun to love math! (I promise I didn't pay them to write it, they did it themselves!)

Late October and Early November we have dug into proportionality:

This can be a scary topic to teach because this is when you learn that students don't realize there is a connection between everything you learn in a math class; until they are confident and successful with proportionality. 

My math partner and I were feeling the struggle the students were having and kept thinking about ways to make this fun. We introduced it in a fun way by allowing them to play games and create unit rates for those games but when it came to the problem solving we were hitting a brick wall. 

Our solution... DIFFERENTIATION! It's one of those words educators consistently hear and are either too limited in time to try and create or unaware of how to truly create it for their students. I believe this is the first time in my 3 years of teaching that I have truly created differentiation and the success it has brought has made me feel extremely excited to keep doing it. 

The first station was for the students who were beginners with percent applications. They worked with the Activboard problems and were able to click on the answers to see if the sound was cheering (correct) or moo'ing (incorrect; yes like a cow). 

The second station was for those who were stronger than the beginners. They "shopped" for items in and then found different percent applications for those items. They were excited due to the fact that they selected what they were going to "buy" which was truly what they were going to do the work for.

The last and final station was a restaurant menu that allowed students to once again select what they were going to "buy". The difference was that students had to find multiple parts of this one problem. They bought their food, found the cost of all of the food, found the tax, found the tip,  found how much change they would get back after they cashed out, and lastly gave a detailed written response. It was once again real world and something they got to select. 

The students had fun during these differentiated stations and they were able to move up when they mastered the one they were in. 

 I am excited to see how we can use the excitement and differentiation with our next unit! 

Other Ways

Since my Algebra II experiment years ago, I've been obsessed with students to start making connections between graphs and algebra. Fairly consistently I have students who dismiss graphing and something uninteresting because no one seems to making connections about why it's so interesting. That's it's possible the "x= " they're able to find with a calculator represents something. Pre-Cal has some algebra objectives and I've brought what I learned with that experiment along for the ride.

In addition to emphasizing graphing, I've been demanding a lot of explanations from my kids this year. A go to for a while now has been justifying a situation. Recently I gave kids a graph and three possibilities. In class we focused on the quadratic formula, it's super solving powers, and it's ability to show you the x-values of the intersection points for a pair of functions. In the setup for this question, I didn't specifically ask them to use this method, though most went with that approach. Here's a representative sample:

The brute force method. The student solved all three and made a connection to the picture with their work. Nothing wrong with it.

However, some found other ways:

An excellent observation of graph transformations. The functions used were simple enough that spotting some features was a quick way to accomplish the task.

The next student made a similar find:

Not only did they attempt a quadratic formula solution (apparently done on the calculator and not recorded) but they weren't satisfied that the mere presence of an imaginary number would do the trick. The slope of the line was important!

This last one might be my favorite:

Not only do they grind through the quadratic formula here, but they remember that if those intersection points are solutions, they are useful! I think only one other student (out of ~60) tried this out.

I was pleasantly surprised because I only had one method in mind when designing the question, forgetting that kids could wander in so many interesting directions.

When our work is shared in authentic ways!

It was a great sight to look out the window and see Kinder kids all spread out working to find the "Math Around Them". Mrs Dunavin brought her class to use our Where are the math boards. It was a great to share our learning. We will be making new boards next week. This is real learning using a the Problem Based Learning.

I'm in love with 'its", and I'm not ashamed to say it!

Soooo, I spoke of my newfound love in my last blog post, and my forsaking of all others for itsLearning.  I'm glad to report that the love affair continues.  As of this post, my students are currently embedding videos of their interpretations of Macbeth into a page I created for them.  Not exactly a new concept, the idea of having students interpret a portion of a play, create a video, and then present the idea to the class, but a solid one that pushes students to move beyond mere rote memorization of the characters and plot.  What is new, though, is the option they have to upload it to a central place where other students are able to view, critique (NOT criticize), and learn from their peers.  In addition to providing the kids with an authentic platform for their productions, I have an additional "evil plan", in that I intentionally created a group project for them to upload so that they may support each other in the technological arena.  This paves the way for future pedagogical projects in which the kids can research, formulate, produce and share lessons that teach their fellow students, all in the platform of itsLearning!  Finally, the best part of this affair is that it is seemingly boundless (well, maybe not literally - but there are still an incredible amount of things yet to be discovered in itsLearning, and I am excited about the opportunities, not just for me, but even more so for my kids!

Techy Stuff for your Classroom!

Apps by Christina on Scribd

Where is the Math?

We are so excited to get our Where is the Math Boards up and running!  Students in our class will maintain the math boards by working in the iPad groups to create problems from things that around us in the world.  The questions are targeted to other 1st graders and kinder students.  We have recorded the questions and answers with a QR code to help young readers still participate!



We have sent the instructions to the other classes through this cute video that Connally and Kirby helped put together.  Each student helped create a problem that is now located around the school.  We hope to change these out every few weeks!



If you are at school, be sure to check out their hard work and learning.

A little learning with lots of pieces...

We wrapped up our learning about Great Americans by putting a little creativity in the mix! I brought in a bunch of "stuff" that kids and pulled it from a bag. Kids were able to match the items with the person. Later we turned the special items into features on the people. We finished by using chatter pix to bring the people to life telling about their life! I am so proud of these kids for the great job they did!