09 Jan 2017
Entry 18 – 2nd Semester Start

Entry 18 – 2nd Semester Start

Last week was our first week back. It was weird being back at school so close to New Years.  We had staff development work on Monday the 2nd but were done by mid-day and were able to work on whatever we needed to.  The wifey had to work for much of my first week off so I tried to get a lot of my second semester planning done then.  My semester stays the same with exception to a new group of kids in my robotics class. GETTING STUDENTS TALKING IN MATH I did a pretty fantastic 'how do we do…
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30 Jan 2016
Week 21 – Teaching Distributive Property & Simplifying Expressions

Week 21 – Teaching Distributive Property & Simplifying Expressions

This week, I used a couple of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics resources for my Pre-Algebra classes.  Additionally, in 6th grade math, I found a wider divide between kids who totally get what we're doing and kids who are fairly lost.  We're also ramping into building actual robots in robotics! PRE-ALGEBRA DISTRIBUTIVE PROPERTY My goal this week was to teach the distributive property and simplifying expressions in Pre-Algebra.  Last year, my 'lesson' on the distributive property was 1 slide in a presentation about simplifying expressions.  Needless to say, they never had a really deep understanding of it.  This year,…
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