Create a picture-Coordinate Graphing

I gave my students a project a few weeks ago and I love how it turned out. Instead of giving them coordinates to make a picture, they drew a picture and then gave me the coordinates. I was not sure what I would get out of them, but I was impressed. I want to tweak how I present the project to the students and once I do that, I'll share what I gave the students. 

They had to include at least 60 coordinate pairs, have at least 5 shapes, and graph in all 4 quadrants. 

Dr. Who anyone?

Kakooma

Another free app to share.  It is not super easy so my students who like a challenge enjoy it. 

Kakoom was created by Greg Tang, who has lots of resources on his website.

The app has changed since I first downloaded it. I like the look of it now, but students do have to create an account before using it. All my ipads in my classroom have the old app so I do not have to worry about that. But if I did, I would just create one account and sign into each ipad app with that account. It is not easy to get signed out, so you wouldn't have to continue to do it.  

This is the description of the game. Students can practice multiplication, addition, and addition of negative numbers. The negative integers is my favorite part of the game because there are few integer operations practice games out there. 

The accounts are to keep track of points. Students can play practice rounds or play live with other students from around the world. 

Blog Posts I Love-Part 3

Part Three of Blog Posts I Love that I ran into this week.

This lesson uses Green Eggs and Ham as an introduction to variables and solving equations.

I made a promise to myself a while ago to not read posts about people complaining about being a teacher. Recently, there have been several blog posts in my twitter/facebook feeds about teachers who resigned because they were unhappy with the direction education is heading. Over at Venspired, Krissy Venosdale writes about how she will never resign.

There are a lot of things in education that I want to change. But there are also a lot of good things that happen every day. Also, if we want things to change, it starts in the classroom. I will do my best to make the changes in my classroom and be an influence to teachers and students around me.

I want to remember to show my students this way to subtract by thinking as subtraction as the distance between two numbers. It would eliminate a lot of problems/mistakes that come with regrouping. It wouldn't always be the most efficient way to subtract. From Math Fireworks

Over at Show Your Thinking, she uses a color coding system to grade. Instead of putting number grades on a paper, students use the colors to see what they did and didn't understand.

Order of Operations Errors-Order of Operations Error Analysis Activity

We've been working on Order of Operations this week and my students have the Order part down, but it is the Operation part they need some help with. 

I did an activity where I asked students to purposely make a mistake when evaluating the expression. Then the class had to find their mistake.

Order of Operations Error Analysis

My students LOVED this. It went over so well and they all wanted to go up several times to try to stump their classmates with the tiny little error they made. 

Eventually, I found 3 students who had evaluated the expressions in 3 different ways and then had the class explain their mistakes. 

They made mistakes with the exponents, solving in the wrong order, ignoring grouping, not regrouping when adding and subtracting, etc. It shows that they know what type of errors are common and will hopefully be on the look out for it. 

I have a station that I will pull out next week where the students will get an expression solved two different ways and will have to sort them into correct and incorrect. That station is available in my store. If you have it, make sure to re-download it because I made some updates to it. 

I Read Books

I have hobbies. 

One of them is reading. I love a good book and right now I am on a reading kick. And I want to share the good books I've read.

Here are some books I've read this year that I would recommend. 

I saw the movie poster, my cousin said it was good, so I read The Martian. In 24 hours. I really liked the science and engineering in it. It was a realistic book. Then I watched the movie which I really enjoyed, but my husband did not. 

Astronaut Mark Watney becomes standard on Mars after his crew thinks he is dead. He has the science the crap out of the supplies he has in order to stay alive until he can (maybe) get rescued. I was on the edge of my seat reading this. 

I think this is THE mystery book of the year. I was number 250 on the library wait list so I was surprised when I got an email saying it was ready for pick up. I was expecting to have to wait a year to read it. 

Rachel takes the same train every day and every day she sees the same couple in their house. She has created a story around this couple; she's named them and begins to feel like she knows them. Until she sees something about them that she only could have noticed. She goes to the police and become entwined in their story. 

This is like a Beauty and the Beast retelling. The dragon comes once every 10 years to a village and takes one girl to live with him. The dragon is responsible for keeping the dangers of the Wood away for the price of one girl who will serve him for 10 years. Agnieszka fears her best friend will be chosen, but is surprised when she is chosen to leave her family, friends, and village to serve the Dragon for 10 years. 

I cannot say enough how I LOVED this book. It is very fantasy, which is not usually what I like, but this was so good. 

I love Mindy Kaling. Of the few TV shows I keep up with, The Mindy Project is one of them. I loved her first book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? and I've been excited to read this book since I heard she was writing it. I think she is funny, down to earth, and honest. I love the message that she gives about being true to yourself and not taking constant reject as a finality. 

What books have you read would you recommend? I am always adding to my ever growing to-read list. 

Order of Operations

I am starting order of operations with my students tomorrow and Tuesday. I prefer not to just jump into algorithms with students without hooking them in or giving them some kind of real-world reason they are learning a new skill. 

Before teaching, my understanding of order of operations was the some people made some rules, decided that multiplication had to be done before addition and we all just blindly follow. Who "they" were was unclear to me. 

When we teach order of operations by just giving an expression and asking students to evaluate it, that is essentially what we are teaching: We are saying that these are just some rules you need to memorize. 

However, as I tell my students, in the real world there aren't signs that make you solve a math problem before you enter a room. Or you don't have to prove you can multiply before you take your driver's test. Instead, math comes up and you have to be able to take all you have learned and decide what is useful in that situation. 

So instead of telling students the order of operations, I introduce them to real life situations and ask them to write numerical expressions that tell the story with numbers. Then I ask them to evaluate those expressions using the knowledge they have of where the expression came from. My students learned order of operations last year without exponents, so they are not completely new to it.

I have created a presentation on Google Slides that will be the lesson I do with my students. 

Use it if you would like. If you would like to make changes to it, go to File and then Make a Copy for yourself to save to your Google Drive. 

Prime Factorization

The students started prime factorization this week. 

I was unfortunately sick on Wednesday and ended up missing school that day. It was the first unplanned absence I had in 5 years. It was agonizing on Tuesday night trying to predict if I would feel better the next day. There were many cons to calling in. Mostly, the students would miss a day of new instruction. I had an emergency sub basket all ready with work for them, but it was just practice. Also, I would miss our class picture. In the end, the sickness won and it is good I did stay home. I ended up losing 5 pounds in one day to being sick. I was miserable. 

So my prime factorization lesson seemed rushed as I was trying to make up for a lost day. But I tried to vary the activities the students did, and gave them time to talk about the math. 

We started the lesson with reviewing what prime and composite numbers were. We talked about definitions, debate over which numbers were prime and composite and watched this video.

In one class, we had to talk in length about the difference between a multiple and a factor. 

Then we added a page to our notebook about prime factorization that looked like this. 

The tree flips down and there is another practice factor tree underneath. The students then got a practice sheet to work on with their group which we then checked. 

Afterwards, I gave everyone a dry erase marker and they practiced making factor trees on their desks while I went around checking and asking questions. 

Some common mistakes I saw were wanting to make the prime factorization smaller. Like taking 2x3x5 and wanting to collapse it to 6x5. We would go back to the definition of prime factorization and ask ourselves if all the numbers were prime. Also, some students just did the factor tree and thought they were done. I had to remind them that the factor tree was the process, not the actual prime factorization. 

Next, I will pull students in small groups and practice so I can really who has it and who needs more help. 

One station I will have next week while I pull students in small group is this Prime Factorization Match Up with QR codes. I try to have many of the stations that my students do include instant feedback. I am actually much better at grading this year than I have been in the past, but it is still not same day grading. Students need to know if they are doing it correctly. This way, they can check right away. Plus they'll have an ipad which they still think is cool.