My Favorite Friday: My Go-To Reviews

Here are a couple of my favorite go-to reviews (not games, really). I use them each maybe 4 times a year. While not particularly original, they definitely should be in everyone's bag o' tricks because they work great every time.

Stations review was one of my very first posts. It takes some time to prep, but the actual implementation couldn't be easier. This is also a great activity to leave for a sub, since you really just have to set the timer and holler "rotate" every five minutes.

Stations Review and Practice

I also love scavenger hunts. The setup is similar to stations, but students get to search the room to find the answer. This has worked great with some of my most active classes. It is also easy to differentiate by pairing students with a helpful partner. Students typically work pretty hard with this activity.

Scavenger Hunt

Happy reviewing!

Made 4 Math: T-Shirt Wall Display

My Calculus and Physics classes often become very close. They are small classes who bond over shared experiences, shared struggles, and inside jokes. Some will decide to commemorate the year with a T-shirt.

What is a teacher to do with a closet full of outdated T-shirts that can neither be worn nor thrown away? Make a lovely wall display, of course.

A bunch of the designs came out off-centered. It really bothered me for a while, but I am so happy with the end result that I decided the off-centeredness is part of the charm. And I am sticking to that. No OCD here. None at all.

A bunch of my favorite teaching memories, right there for me to look at every day. As an extra bonus, I am hoping that my Algebra 2 students will look at these shirts, see how much fun we have, and sign up for Calculus and/or Physics. In the future, I add more shirts!

Here are the specifics, if you are interested . . .

You will need:
1.  Old T-shirts, cut off the sleeves and cut down the sides.
2.  A 4 x 8 sheet of 1/4 inch OSB. ($7 at Lowe's). They cut it down partially for me in the store. At home, the Hubs finished cutting into 24 12" x 16" rectangles for me.
3.  Quilt batting (to add dimension). Cut into 12" x 16" rectangles as well.
4.  A staple gun.
5.  Some type of wall mounting. I used industrial strength velcro.

For each rectangle, I layered one side of the t-shirt with a couple rectangles of batting and stapled it all to the back of the particle board. It is helpful to have two sets of hands for this part. (Thanks again, Hubs).

Trim the excess fabric.

Like I said, off-centered is beautiful.

Then add velcro strips and stick to the wall.

Sounds simple, but it honestly took a ridiculous amount of time. Totally worth it, though.

P.S. If you know an English teacher (and I know that you do), encourage them to check out Teacher, Teacher, I Declare! I am so excited that my former English teacher (now a colleague and friend) has started a teaching blog. Mrs. E has years of experience, but she has never stopped learning. She is always introducing the rest of us to fresh ideas and innovative ways to use technology. You know that teacher in your school who is the glue? That's her. We all love her. I know the English edublogosphere (is there one?) will, too.

Hopefully My Last Post About Supplies

My battle with supplies continues. I wrote about my success, followed by semi-failure. I have decided there is no perfect solution for supply-less students. It is a matter of preference and what works for your students in your classroom. I've tried most everything, and this is how it worked for me:

1.  Exchanging supplies for a valuable item. Works great, but I hated the disruption and felt like valuable instruction time was lost.
2.  Selling supplies. Also works great, as long as the child who doesn't have a pencil also doesn't have a quarter, which is likely. Then you have to decide if you are going to give the student a pencil or not and try to collect the quarter later. Too much hassle for me.
3.  Expecting students to borrow from another student. This also works pretty well, but I started to feel bad for the same poor students getting hit up each day.
4.  Providing supplies freely. Nice and non-disruptive, but supplies can go un-returned.

Providing supplies remains my method of choice. I try to set it up so the disappearance is minimized, and I live with replacing items occasionally in exchange for avoiding less-preferred hassles. This year, I am tweaking the location of my supplies.

Back story:  I decided to test out this classroom arrangement I read about from Mathy McMatherson. It is pretty genius, really. All students can simultaneously see the front of the room AND interact with a group of four without re-arranging desks. I hate moving desks. I wonder how many opportunities I have missed to allow students to work cooperatively because I didn't want to move the stinking desks. I am hoping I will be able to move toward a more cooperative, student-centered classroom, just by removing that barrier. I'll keep you posted . . .

Bonus! This new arrangement allows for a supply caddy right in the middle of each table:

I found the shower caddies at Walmart for $.97. Each contains:

1. Two basic operation calculators.

2.  A set of colored pencils and a pencil sharpener.

3.  Two spoon pencils. 

4.  Two knife erasers.

5.  A note card holder.

I am most excited about the note card holder. I plan to use it for any accessories that are specific to a lesson. It can hold math dominoes, puzzle cards, sorting cards, log war cards, and more. When I get to that part of the lesson, students can take them out without wasting any time on distribution.

Additional items I might include permanently or as needed:

6.  Green fork pens.

7.  Dry erase markers and erasers.

8.  Scissors and glue sticks

9.  Graphing calculators.

10. Clickers.

My hope is that I can trade a bunch of distractions and transitions for more instruction time.

Finally, I have been thinking about the inevitable. There will be broken, consumed, and lost or stolen items. How to minimize that? I have a few ideas:

1.  Don't have the caddies out on the first day of school. Wait until there is time to give students clear instructions and expectations.

2.  Have an inventory list on the side of the caddy. Part of the closing routine each day includes students double-checking to make sure everything is there.

3.  Ask students to donate consumable items. Will they?

P.S. It turns out that Sarah posted something really similar earlier today. I decided to go ahead and publish this, but I encourage you to check out her version. She uses supply baskets in conjunction with interactive notebooks. I don't do ISN's, but I don't think I would want to try without reading up on all of her good ideas. And she says she'll post pics of her supply basket, so stay tuned!

Scenes From Summer, and What's Next

For these past eight weeks, I have thought very little about the teaching and learning of math. I spent about eight hours getting settled into my new classroom (still a ton left to do) and I have kept up with google reader (leave that thing alone for a week and it's out of control, am I right?). That is all.

But I have been doing some very important things. Like working on my flip-flop tan.

And a  family vacation in Colorado. We un-plugged for a week of hiking and relaxing. It could not have been more perfect!

And a six-day getaway, just me and the Hubs. This Kansas girl loves me some California.

As I prep for another year, I will be drawing from this inspiration:

1.  This quote from Rational Expressions' letter to a new(er) teacher, advising new teachers to toss a large part of their curriculum each year:

"Put it like this: you get smarter as you keep on at this job. If you use old materials, you're using the stuff that the stupider version of you made."

I like to think that I am always trying something new, but I will admit that way too much of my curriculum dates pre-2009 (the year that I became a parent and spare time became a distant memory). I started reading/blogging in 2010, so I am way smarter now. :) One of my goals this year is to toss lessons/units that are "just okay" to see what the smarter version of myself will do instead.

2.  Common Core conference.  I will be attending a 3-day conference with a focus on planning for implementation. I am hoping for some inspiration and direction. And fun times with my colleagues are certain to get me in the back-to-school spirit.

3.  Made4Math. This is right down my alley! I heart crafts. I have a few things up my sleeve that I hope to be rolling out in the next few weeks.

4.  Twitter Math Camp. I am sad that I won't be attending. Maybe next time. I hope there is a next time! For this year, I will be jealously waiting to hear all about it. So let's hear it, bloggers!

Happy Endings (Mostly)

Last day of school. The end is always bittersweet. I hate good-byes and generally dislike the ending of things, but I am looking forward to time at home with my 2-year-old and resting up for a fresh start next year. I have a list of things to do over the summer, both work and fun. I love how this year is ending. Mostly.

This activity went better than I hoped:  Try to write an equivalent for the numbers 1-100 using four 4's and any mathematical procedure. Autograph your solution. It was nice to see students work on this when they were otherwise ready to be done with thinking. I really loved seeing factorials and other creative solutions as they showed up.

I always get especially attached to my seniors in physics and calculus. A group of students in my physics class did a skit as part of their senior class variety show. There was Humpty Dumpty falling off of a wall, and calculations for force and final velocity. Oh, and a senior boy dressed as me, singing to the class and offering to have everyone over for meatloaf. I am not sure that the crowd understood our inside jokes, but it warmed my heart. Here they are, don't they look like a fun group?

There was a class t-shirt. "Life doesn't come with an answer book". I love to say that. It used to be true, before Google. Now I have to insert the word "always".

My algebra students worked pretty diligently on their final projects. Speaking of final projects, today I am more in love with blogging than ever. I posted about this project just a few days ago, and received some wonderful comments. Thanks to others being kind enough to read and thoughtful enough to comment, I now know how to make the project better for next time. Thank you, blogosphere! I hope that I can return the favor.

And, one not-so-happy ending . . . One of my favorite colleagues has officially announced that she is leaving. I will move to her room next year, trading my cinderblock walls for a lovely corner window. The view is street side parking and a railroad track, but I am looking forward to seeing sunshine and the first snowflakes falling next winter . . .

. . . Still, I would be much happier if she was staying! We have been through a lot together these last seven years:  Tornado recovery, a trailer classroom, celebrity sightings, and learning (the hard way) that the top shelf in the closet won’t hold a full set of textbooks. Together we conquered our state's math assessment. We shared the victory of watching our most struggling students succeed. Working with her made me a better teacher. I am going to miss you, friend in the middle. We all will.

PIeces (Final) Project

Students at our school can opt out of second semester final exams by doing well on state assessments. Most of my students fall into that category. Given the choice to take finals or get out of school two days early, you can imagine what most high school students will choose. With no exams, trying to convince students to review at the end of the year is next to impossible.

A few years ago, I switched to a final project instead:  Create a picture using parent functions (and/or conics) and their transformations along with restricted domains or ranges. I like how it encompasses so many things we have learned this year. Review, without looking at all like a painful study guide.

Leading up to this project, I do a week-long mini-unit reviewing all the different types of graphs we've studied this year -- linear, absolute value, quadratic, exponential, rational, polynomial, and conics. We work on their transformations, and then add in restricted domains and ranges. We sketch simple piecewise functions using known functions, and then more complex ones using a graphing calculator.

At the end of the unit, they do this outline of Texas using a graphing calculator.  (I wish I knew where this came from. Someone gave it to me and it became the inspiration for this project).

Now students are primed to make their own picture.

Here are the project requirements, rubric, and final product sheet.

Some questions/discussions that come naturally out of this activity:  How do I make the vertex of x^2 hit the point (5, 2)? How do I make x^2 skinnier? How to I find where this straight line intersects this parabola?  How do I restrict this domain/range to get half of the ellipse?  And (yikes!) how do I write the equation for this straight line?

Here are a few student samples from a previous year. I loved the penguin!

I've received a few projects already this year that are okay. Students are looking for ways to keep it as simple as possible and still meet all the requirements. I am not disappointed, really. They are doing exactly what I have asked them to do. For next time, I think I will edit the project a bit to require that more variety in graph selection be used.

Over all, it isn't a bad way to end the year. I like that students are still working on math up to the last day. They are being creative and I hear mathy conversations taking place. And I am not pulling my hair out trying to convince anybody to review for an exam they aren't going to take. 

Zero Effort Videos (not just for flipping)

I've gone back and forth on my thoughts about flipping the class, but that is not the point of this post. Flipped classroom aside, I think there are some really good reasons to record direct instruction:

1. For students who are absent.
2. For students to review.
3. To store up a bank of videos for future use.

So, I've spent this entire year recording all of my direct instruction . . . LIVE*.

Live videos are not perfect. They contain mistakes, interruptions, announcements over the intercom, and (my personal favorite) fire alarms (followed by my voice, "Nooooooo!", it happened). I have definitely had to let go of my perfectionist tendencies to put them out there.

Obviously, live videos are not useful for flipping. Unless, like me, you teach the same courses every year and are willing to delay the flip for a year while you make recordings. Then BAM, there you go.

On the up side, live videos have some great benefits. I can pause and check for understanding and then address misconceptions as part of the video. Student questions and answers naturally become part of the video as well. After class, I can make them available to absent students with a couple of clicks. I can also save what I have written as a pdf and make that available, too.

I am mostly happy with the results (minus the noticeable raw-ness of the videos). The process could not be easier. Not counting the practice needed to become proficient with the equipment I am using, I have spent zero extra time creating videos. I just hit the record button whenever I say something in front of the class.

I wanted to know how many of my students were using the videos or pdfs, so I gave a quick survey:

28% said they had never used either, indicating that they didn't have internet access (computers are readily available at school, so not exactly a good excuse), or that they simply preferred getting help from me or another student in class.

The remaining 72% had used one or the other or both. Many said that they appreciated these resources and found them to be very helpful. The majority sited one or the other as the primary method they used to catch up after being absent from class.

I am encouraged by these numbers, and I plan to continue to live record in the future. Technology has provided me with a low effort, high result means for communicating with my students. I am still on the fence about the flip.

*The mechanics:  To create my live videos I use a smart slate, a blue snowball microphone, a mac mini, and projector. The result is a Khan Academy-ish screen cast where you hear the teacher talking and watch the writing magically appear. I am sure there are other means to accomplish the same thing. In fact, these tools are not necessarily my first choice. They are standard (except for the microphone) in all the classrooms at my school, so I am just using what is available. The smart slate takes a lot of practice. I have also used an interwrite pad and felt it was a bit more user-friendly.