math blogging Archives

22 Dec 2016

Entry 17 – Needing Math Teachers Willing To Comment on Student Blogs

It's Thursday of the first week of Christmas break. Thought I'd reflect a bit on something new I tried in this last week of the semester. STUDENT MATH BLOGS My school is an International Baccalaureate (IB) school. In IB schools, students write an Internal Assessment (IA) in math their junior and senior year; a thesis on an exploration of some mathematical concept. While preparing middle schoolers for the upcoming IA is part of why I have students writing about math in math class, the bigger reason is to give me a way to assess their conceptual understanding; can they explain a…

Week 29 – Proportions Tests, Percent Introductions, and Tax Day

This week we finished up proportions in Pre-Algebra and got introduced to percents in Math Skills. Also had several teacher visitors who are applying for the open math position at our school (our other math teacher is moving to Brazil to teach). Oh, and it was tax day in our classroom economy, PRE-ALGEBRA We finished up proportions this week with discussing similar figures and how we use proportions to solve them. As a review activity, I gave them a quiz that I used last year. They worked on it together and we went over it. The following was probably the…

Week 8 – Better Student Blogs and Plickers Test Review

It's the end of the second month of school. This week we did our second round of student blogging and it went smoother than last time. We also used Plickers for the first time and it went fairly well. MATH JOURNAL BLOGGING In Pre-Algebra, we're at the end of Unit 01. Feels a bit slow but now that we've got all our systems and procedures in place, I know the rest of the units will go a bit quicker. We had 7 different lessons in Unit 01 (number sets, properties, exponents, square roots, cube roots, order of operations, and scientific…