One Week of Notebooking

We started our notebooks on Monday. I notebooked last year, but I never fully committed to it. We didn't start until about October, and my students were not able to maintain self control when they were in groups, so we stopped soon after Christmas and only did it occasionally from then on. This year, we are going full force!

Starting from the beginning...

I think I posted about this in my first post. I got it from Mrs. Hester and it is how we are doing SBG this year. We glued it into the front cover so it is there for easy reference.

Last year, I had the kids count 10 pages at the beginning and start numbering 1-200. That was stupid time consuming. This year, I put this together and I love it. It only takes up one page, I love that it folds open, and I love even more that the right hand pages are in the right hand column and left pages in the left hand column. Win!

We jumped right in to Integer Operations. I thought about putting our syllabus and some multiple intelligence/personality things in, but the LA teacher did the intelligences and we are low on paper, so straight to business. You can download it in my TpT store for free. The notes were fill in the blank and there is space for you to use your own foldable. I drew my number line, but I had the kids glue one in that folds up and goes from -40 to 40. 

LH pages are always hard for me. Last year I had them do a KWL type thing on each page where they wrote the objective and what they already knew before the lesson then afterwards they did a 321 type thing. 3 things they learned, 2 questions they still have, and instead of 1 they had to do a prove it. I would usually give them about 1-3 problems to solve. 

This year, I am going to just have them glue their homework on the left, or at least for now. Anybody out there have some good LH page ideas?

Rational operations were next. I made this foldable too, and you can download it in my TpT store for free!! All of the steps are typed out and there is space for you to put in your own examples.

I like to just write the problems without solving them out so that if kids are absent and using my notebook they have to do the work instead of just copying. I think they get more out of it. I also need to do better at adding color. Last year's notebook was much more attractive looking!

I've seen this PEMDAS organizer floating around a few places. I'll do an update with it color coded and solved out because right now, from your perspective, it doesn't look like it is a useful page. I like that the MD and AS are next to each other to remind kids they go left to right...even though they still try do do M and A before D and S every single time.

We are starting a glossary in the back. I have the unit 1 vocab up HERE in my TpT store. We will put the page number for the ISN in the upper corner. The Frayer model template came from Mrs. Hester.

Last but not least, on the back cover we glued in an iPad login sheet that Christine at The Math Nerdette put together. She works in the same county as I do and knows the pain of kids who cannot remember their logins and passwords to save their lives. Hopefully this will save me from resetting Edmodo passwords one million times this year.

Switching Gears...

I had my first SBG experience this weekend since I gave my first quiz on Friday. I'll post about it more tomorrow, because I'm just a little concerned that I'm not quite on track and hopefully someone can lend some advice!

Brittany

PEMDAS War

We have spent the last two weeks reviewing 7th grade skills, and boy did we need it! As I expected, the kids cannot remember integer rules and think that multiplication and addition are always before division and subtraction. Sigh. I'm torn right now because they need A LOT more review with this, but I think we will have to spiral it in with everything else or I won't be getting into 8th grade curriculum until October.

In trying to use Math Workshop this year and pull away from worksheets and do more activities and games, I developed...

32 cards with all operations for integers and rational numbers. Some are easy mental math, and others are pretty challenging. I also made sure to include a lot of 4(-8) notation to get them used to it. 

The Rules:

Deal the cards between partners. Both partners flip a card at the same time. Students solve both problems correctly as quickly as possible. Whoever slaps the card with the higher value first wins both cards. The person with the most cards at the end wins.

This game can be downloaded from my TpT store for free here.

Week 1

We made it through week 1, and what a chaotic week it was! Between schedules being messed up school-wide (for the first two days I only had two classes and the other two were empty), switching to 60 minute blocks from 80 minute blocks to kids not knowing where they are supposed to be, the first half of the week was a little crazy, but we survived!

Day 1: We did the usual boring first day of school activities: went over the class description, rules, procedures, etc. etc. I am requiring parents to come conference with me after the holiday so I can try to establish those relationships now. I got almost every sheet back, so that is a good sign! Then we did a post-it activity where kids wrote their goal for the year, why they think math is important, qualities of a good leader, how I can help them, and what they want our class to be like every day on stickies and put them up on posters. I'll add pictures later. I totally forgot to do that.

Day 2: Die Hard with a Vengeance problem: You have two buckets, one is 3 gal and the other is 5 gal. A bomb is about to go off and needs exactly 4 gallons of water to keep it from going off. You may only pour the water back and forth between the two buckets, pour the water on the ground, or fill it back up. If you place the wrong amount of water on the bomb, it will explode. No marking the buckets, and estimating is too risky! How can you get exactly 4 gallons of water in the 5 gallon bucket?

This got us right into working as a team. They did really well with accepting each other's ideas and finding a solution. I was really impressed!!

Day 3: Saxon placement test just to make sure the 8th graders who should be in algebra are and the 7th graders who should be in 8th grade accelerated are. As I expected, we are really going to have to focus on word problems and how to translate them into equations. Fractions and decimals don't seem to be high on the list of skills we are fluent in either. For example, there was a question that asked how many quarter pound hamburgers could be made from 100lbs of beef. Almost every student saw "quarter" and thought "25," so they made 4 hamburgers. When I told them the next day that a 25lb hamburger would weigh as much as my friend's two-year-old, they realized they didn't check to make sure their answer made sense.

Day 4: Thursday was a little....chaotic. When I got to school, I was told that the 7th grade class I had taken on would be moving back to 7th grade because they were going on a schedule different from the rest of the building to lower class sizes after the weekend. I didn't want to do anything too intensive, so we did some personality and multiple intelligence tests. It was nice getting to know the kids in that way. Almost every student in that class is kinesthetic and an "orange" personality, meaning they need things to be upbeat and exciting. My second period, which is all 8th graders, we tried a PEMDAS sudoku, which turned out to be more challenging than I thought. For the second half of the day, we played Integer Insanity from Live Love Math. That went MUCH better. I guess that's the nice thing about having planning halfway through the day. If something isn't working, I can always regroup and do something more appropriate 3rd and 4th block.

Day 5: Friday went really well :) FINALLY! We played order of operations bingo. They are really struggling with integers, but I expected that since my 8th graders were still trying to wrap their heads around it when the EOG came along last year. They also think that Multiplication always comes before Division and Addition always before Subtraction because of PEMDAS. We will have to work on that next week.

My homeroom is all AVID kids, so we went outside and did a team building activity: radioactive swamp. I split my class into two teams of 9. One team ended up being all girls and one boy, and the other was mixed. Oops! I gave each team some newspaper, and they had to go approximately 30 yards without stepping in the grass. Their whole team had to get across. One person on their team couldn't use their legs, and if anyone touched the grass, that body part was unusable. That was some GREAT Friday entertainment! The 50/50 team did not work well together by any means. The boys took almost all of the newspaper, wrapped their shoes in it, and shuffled across the grass to the finish line. Once they were there, they thought they were done and didn't help the rest of their team across. The team that was mostly girls ripped the paper into strips and made a path with the last person picking up the last piece of paper then handing it to the front of the line (you can't throw the paper) to make it longer.

All-in-all, it was a good week and I think it will be MUCH better than last year for many, many reasons. Onward to week two!