Mathsational

  Greetings Educators. Do you ever feel like you’re constantly re-teaching math concepts before every test? Does it seem like your students forget everything they learned earlier in the year? You’re not alone! This is exactly where spiral review comes in. By incorporating consistent, strategic review into your warm-ups, you can enhance retention, alleviate test anxiety, and foster long-term confidence, all without adding extra stress to your schedule. What Exactly Is Spiral Review? Think of it as building muscle memory for math. Instead of teaching a concept once and moving on, spiraling involves revisiting essential skills over time and in different contexts. The benefits are significant: Enhance fluency and memory Strengthen connections between concepts Reduce test anxiety Increase confidence before exams Why Warm-Ups Are the Perfect Tool The advantage of spiral review is that it doesn’t require rewriting your curriculum. Just a few minutes daily during warm-ups can make a big di...

I've gotten very far behind in my #SundayFunday prompts, but I'm hoping to catch up!   This is the prompt from week eight of the Sunday Funday blogging initiative.  It's never too late to join in!  You can read more about the challenge  here  if you like.  This week's challenge is to write about our warm-up and closure routines.  To be honest, I've had a very difficult start to the year.  The routines that I've used for the last 4 years including hybrid learning and standards based grading  (also see the 7 posts following this one if you like) have suddenly been deemed inappropriate in my current placement.  That, however, is another post for another day :(   Because of these circumstances, I am still looking for a good routine for my current constraints .  I look forward to reading the other posts to see what everyone else has found success with.  In the meantime, here is what I've done in the past. I...

I'll be the first to admit the my formative assessment strategies are typically very low tech.  I'd like to incorporate more high tech options into my class, especially at the direct station.  My class is not one-to-one, but I do have a class set of laptops and many (but not all) of my students have their own smartphone or tablet.  This should make more tech integration at the direct station very doable.  However, I need to give students time to log off and put the classroom laptops away, so I'll be sticking to low tech exit tickets. Here is what I have done in the past at each of the stations for formative assessment and what I'd like to do this year. Warm-ups:  About half of the time, I like to do a fun warm-up such as Estimation 180 , Visual Patterns , Graphing Stories , Which One Doesn't Belong, or  Would you Rather .  The rest of the time, I like to use the warm-up for lagging or spiraled practice in conjunction with the exit ticket. ...

*singing* One of these things is not like the others.  One of these things just doesn't belong... Which One Doesn't Belong is a fairly new resources.  As usual, I stumbled upon this jem while catching up on tweets one day.  I use these as warm-ups about once per week in my 9-12 classroom.  I am not concerned that the topic we are studying is represented in the set, but rather that students think of multiple solutions.  That is my favorite part of using these sets.  I encourage students to come up with a reason why any of the 4 pictures could be the one that doesn't belong. I love that there is often an obvious solution so all students can find success but there are multiple answers for students who are ready to think more deeply.  I have not tried the incomplete sets yet, but I think those would be awesome for higher order thinking skills as would making up your own WODB set.

One of the reasons that I wanted to start a blog is that I had been an MTBoS consumer for about a year.  It all started last summer at a conference when I was encouraged to live tweet during the event.  I thought the idea was a little silly and I was not really interested in keeping up with the Kardashians.  However, I did learn something that I considered to be tweet worthy.  So I joined and tweeted.  After a few months, I had found about 50 math teachers from around the world that had great ideas.  These teachers were sharing their resources at no cost.  Twitter became my go-to lesson planning resource. Eventually I started to notice questions on twitter for which I felt I could contribute to the solution.  I tried to reply with 140 characters, but I often wanted to share links.  So, I decided to start a blog.  So far I've blogged about standards based grading and hybrid learning.  This next series of posts will be about my...