Mathsational

I'm nearly caught-up with the #SundayFunday challenges.  Last week's challenge was to observe yourself.   Here  is more info if you'd like to join in the fun. I actually had a coworker record a lesson for me recently, I had not yet made the time to watch it and reflect.  This prompt gave the extra push that I needed. My lesson started with Which One Doesn't Belong warm-up.  This is one of my favorite style of warm-up.  All four images have a reason that it is different from the others.  This allows for all students to participate at various levels.  It is a perfect example of a low floor high ceiling task.  The warm-up provided a chance for students to practice using vocabulary like vertex, opening direction, parabola, discriminant, and axis of symmetry.  When students describe these features without using the appropriate vocab, I prompt them for it and it is reaffirmed with everyone. Prior to this lesson, my algebra 2 ...

Here is another better late than never #SundayFunday post :) At least this one is only 5 weeks late and I'm making up ground! Here is more info if you'd like to join in the fun. It's really no surprise that I ended up being a teacher. I had a very difficult childhood. I won't go into the gory details, but although my mother did the very best she could with the resources she had, she could not protect me from everything. My early life was filled with neglect, hunger, inadequate shelter & clothing and abuse. I was surrounded by illegal activities and poor role models. At school, no one knew what I was going through and no one treated me differently. That is exactly how I liked it. I did not have the means to develop skills in areas like music or athletics, but I could take advantage of my free appropriate education. I quickly learned that if I worked really hard, I would excel, and that is exactly what I did. I loved the feeling of control that I ha...

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...

Goals, I have too many right now.  This Sunday Funday prompt comes at the perfect time for me to solidify them and hone in on just a few so that I can reach those goals. My big aspirations for the year include tweaking my past standard based grading policies and well as blended/hybrid learning structure. I also want to begin to incorporate HyperDocs, visual random grouping, vertical non-permanent surfaces.  Finally, I'd like to include more projects and technology in my classroom.  And this is the narrowed down list! First, I'll start with HyperDocs.  I came across this book  The HyperDoc Handbook: Digital Lesson Design Using Google Apps  in my efforts to reorganize my blended/hybrid format and to include more meaningful technology.  The idea of HyperDoc is to create an interactive student-paced lesson.  One of the issues I've had in the past few years has been getting my students to engage at the independent station with fidelity.  ...

This past weekend was my second year attending EdCamp Lancaster and my fourth EdCamp overall.  If you have never heard about EdCamps, you should start looking for one in your area.  Here is a quick video on EdCamps if you are unfamiliar. I always try to sell the idea to my department when one rolls around. I tell them that breakfast and sometimes even lunch is included, there are great door prizes, you can earn ACT48 credits (Pennsylvania's continuing education requirement for teachers), and of course that it always ends up being some of my best PD  every year. This year I attended the following sessions and picked up a few morsels to bring back to my classroom: Math Tech Tools - I shared Desmos's awesome activity builder and new geometry tool .  Most people knew about the graphing calculator, but not the other two.  I really advocated for the digital card sorts since that is my favorite feature. The math tech tool that I learned about is  Ma...

This year I made a goal to tweet one picture from my class each day.  I'm also trying to blog bi-weekly about what is happening in my classroom.  Here are the tweets from days 11-20. Day 11:  On this day, algebra 2 students reviewed linear inequalities by playing a game of 3X3, which is similar to bingo.  There are 4 boards and a deck of cards.  In each group of four, students turn a card from the deck face up.  The card has a linear inequality.  Students look at their boards to see if they have the matching graph.  If they do, they mark that box.  The first student in the group to get 3 in a row wins.  Play can continue for second and third place.  I found the original assignment from  @MathBerts   here .  And  here is a link to the the document that I edited.  I blogged about this activity last year as well. #teach180 #alg1chat tic tac toe with linear inequalities pic.twitter.com/Gq9kRrOmDa — Je...

This year I responded to @mathequalslove 's challenge to join #teach180. This will be a challenge for me, but I'll give it a go! https://t.co/Vv0UQQSpGj — Jennifer Abel (@abel_jennifer) August 22, 2016 I have to admit that I thought I'd have more trouble remembering to take a picture every day.  In reality, I almost never take a picture during class because I'm so busy teaching and working with students.  However, I remember to take screenshots of our notes or an online activity or I remember to take a picture of student work at the end of the day. This year I'm lucky enough to have only 2 preps, CP geometry and Honors algebra 2.  I try to represent both classes equally in my #teach180 posts. Now, finding the time to blog about this has been a whole other challenge.  I'm aiming to collect my tweets and reflect on a group of them every other week.  So here we are, finished with 41 days of school.  I'm going to try to blog about 10 days at a...

With #MTBoSBlaugust happening right now, it was very easy to find some new blogs to read.   Here  is a list of the participating blogs if you are looking for new sources of inspiration too.  When I started looking, I was searching for great ideas that I could use in my classroom.  Here is what I found. 1)   Socrative 101 - Making "Digital Task Cards" :  I recently wrote about how I'd like to use technology at the direct station for formative assessment more often.  One thing that has been holding me back is the difficulty that exists in writing mathematical symbols on these sites.  Rock Star Math Teacher posted directions on how to use powerpoint to make this process easier.    Here  are some of the of the socrative quizzes that she has already made.  Powerpoint has an easy to use equation editor and then you just save each slide as an image.  I'm excited to try this to digitize some of my current whiteboard p...

I feel a bit weird about organization, because my system is far from perfect and I still need to work on this myself.  My main issue, now that I'm entering my 13th year in the classroom, is that I have way too much stuff.  Luckily, I've switched classrooms at least once every three years.  This has at least forced me to purge once every few years.  So that is tip number 1. 1)  Purge often.  Don't wait until you need to move all of your stuff for a new building or a new job or for retirement.  Go through all of your stuff every spring and/or fall and get rid of as much stuff as possible. 2)  Digital Folders.  I have a flash drive with literally thousands of files.  I need more folders to organize.  I have folders for each course, unit, and year that I have taught.  I've got folders for projects, warm-ups, and anything else you can imagine Prior to mass storage like this, I used a 1 inch binder for every unit in e...

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. ...

I love this time of year.  Planning for the new school year is in full swing and you get a fresh start.  No matter what has happened in the past, you get a brand new group of students and you can do anything, change anything, keep anything.  You can build a better classroom every year. This year, that main thing that I am going to start is student reflection after each station (twice per day) in my hybrid classroom.  The reason that I'd like to do this is to prevent kids from just going through the motions.  Often I feel like my students don't metacognate about their learning.  I want to them to really think about what they have learned and what they have done and accomplished.  I may do this less often as the year progresses, maybe once per day or once per rotation after I know that students have started to become more reflective. The thing that I am going to stop doing is more like something that I am going to modify.  I love sta...

I spent most of my summer taking two grade classes to earn a PDE endorsement in Online Learning.  However, during the time that I had free, I found time to work on my courses for this coming school year. First, to help with student self reflection, I created this document .  The document will be used at the end of each station in my hybrid classroom .  Students will also reflect on the work that they do outside of class.  I want students to track the resources they used when stuck as well as reflect on how well they understood the assignment.  I will be using this tool as a replacement for grading classwork and homework for completion.  I will spot check student work occasionally, but for the most part it will be largely self reported.  This assignment will be worth 5% of students' overall grade. I also reevaluated how I would weight grades for  my class.  85% of the grade will be standards based .  These grades will come ...

Oh how I wish I could be seriously planning for my first few days of classes.  I just got summoned to district jury duty.  This will be the fourth time that I have had jury duty.  Last year, I actually got called to local court twice in five months.  I was not all that worried about the second call because I know I was excused for a year.  When I called to let them know that I had just served, the lady on the phone was surprised to find that my name was in the pool three times.  I'm under the impression she fixed that, but who knows.  I wrote to the court to request a postponement until next summer.  At the very least, any time that is not during the first few days of school.  I certainly don't want to leave a substitute in charge of building a classroom culture for me during those very important first few days of class. I also have a jam packed curriculum, especially in algebra 2.  This past year, I messed up with pacing and had ...

My goal during the summer is to blog at least once a week.  I've failed pretty miserably with this so far this year.  One of my goals was to blog about my favorite practice structures.  Let's be honest, a lot of the content in high school math is either inapplicable (I'm looking at you polynomial long division) or requires lots of practice to build fluency.  So, although I do like to try to do one project with honest to goodness real world application for each unit or marking period, I still need something engaging to do with kids to help them practice. The practice structure that I am sharing today is Old Maid. I love having my kids practice the most basic skills (ones that require little to no writing) by playing card games.  One sad side note is that I usually need to give directions on how to play these games because apparently, parents don't play games with their kids anymore. So, I just now created a new version of Old Maid for my first unit in algeb...

This lesson may not make sense to some of you, especially if you do not know me or what a hybrid classroom looks like.  You can read more about my hybrid classroom on the Hybrid Learning and MTSD Training – Hybrid Learning tabs of my blog. The short version of this information is that my students learn by traveling through 4 stations over a period of 2 days.  The first day consists of a 5 minute warm-up, two 20 minute stations and a 5 minute closure activity (usually an exit ticket).  The second day consists of a 5 minute warm-up, one 20 minute station, one 20 minute whole group activity and a 5 minute closure activity.  Sometimes the whole group activity is a lecture, sometimes it is a quiz, and other times it is a group work assignment or project.  The warm-ups and exit tickets might be review of a specific skill or a fun MTBoS warm-up.  Check out the MTBoS Resources tab above for more information. The first of the 3 stations is the indepen...

Recently, I had a short twitter conversation with a teacher about eliminating formal review days before tests.  I responded that I no longer give traditional unit tests, so I also no longer do traditional review days. Instead, I give a cumulative quiz once every 4-6 school days.  These quizzes are heavy on recently learned material and light on content that was taught longer ago.  I use a form of standards based grading, so I use my gradebook every week to decide which older topics my kids need extra help with.  Those become the items added to what would otherwise be a traditional quiz.  You can read more about how I implemented standards based grading if you like. Since I also use hybrid learning, I then work a review of the older topics into my stations.  During small group instruction, I check in with students about new material and we usually practice on individual whiteboards.  I mix in a few of the targeted review content as well....