Mathsational

Previously, I wrote about a form of practice called Chains.  In a chain activity, students pick any card and solve the problem on it.  Then, they find the solution to that question on another card and solve that one.  This continues until all cards have been used.  Sometimes you can also run this as a scavenger hunt and put the questions up around the room.  The activity is great because it is self checking and offers a switch-up from the usual worksheet for practice. You can read the original post here for more information.  In that post, I included two example activities.  The first was for properties of parallelograms .  And the second was for finding vertices of parabolas . Here are two new examples: Grade 3 - Telling Time to the Minute Grade 7 - Adding and Subtracting Rational Numbers Enjoy.  I'd love to hear about it if you try any of these or make your own :)

This year I've taken on the #teach180 challenge.  The challenge is to post one tweet per day showing a glimpse inside your classroom.  I'm also putting the tweets together in a biweekly blog so that I can share the resources that I'm tweeting about. Day 61:  Today was a quiz day.  I give cumulative quizzes on each fifth day of class.  However, next week I'll be skipping the cumulative quiz in favor of a benchmark test to help my students prepare for midterms. Today is another fun filled quizzing/grading day #teach180 pic.twitter.com/MfiPBgM3ph — Jennifer Abel (@abel_jennifer) December 1, 2016 Day 62:   Today in geometry, we practiced using properties of parallelograms with a chain activity.   Here is a link to the activity if you'd like to give it a try.  I wrote about this type of activity here if you want more info. In #geometrychat : properties of parallelograms with a "chain" activity (the answer to each question tells which Q to...

I especially like activities that are self checking, but don't totally give away the solutions.  For examples, a worksheet with a answerbank, but the answers are scrambled.  This allows students to have an idea that they are on the right track. Chains simply involve using task cards in such a way that the solution to the previous question is on the next card.  Some people makes theirs with a start and end card.  I typically create mine in a loop and students start with any card. Most often, I create them in powerpoint, print the 4 slides per page in landscape, then cut in half twice to create the cards. Here is an example from geometry on properties of parallelograms. Here is an example from algebra on finding the vertex of a parabola.