The end of the school year is full of mixed emotions for me. I’m excited for summer and at the same time I start to have separation anxiety from my students. My classes are usually small because I teach math lab classes and I really get attached to my kids. It’s awesome that there are no more tests to prepare for, but at the same time I don’t want to just have unstructured activities for my students for the last 3 weeks. [Read more…] about 11 Activities for the Last Week of School in Math Class
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Math Teaching Strategy that Works: Paper Chains
So you might be thinking, why you would use paper chains in a 7th or 8th grade math classroom? When I first saw a paper chain as an activity on Teacher Pay Teachers I had the same question. They seemed a little superfluous. Actually, they looked like a waste of time to me and I dismissed them. Then, one day I was trying to think of a novel activity for my students near the end of last year. Plus, I was feeling a bit adventurous and itching for a change with testing in our rear view mirror. I made a template for a paper chain. [Read more…] about Math Teaching Strategy that Works: Paper Chains
11 Easy Activities For Teaching Effects of Transformations
When we get to learning about transformations near the end of the year, it always surprises me that my students have a pretty strong foundation in transformations. Hooray! But the caveat with transformations in 8th grade is that they have to find the resulting coordinates without using a graph. This boils down to a whole bunch of rules that students have to learn and memorize. To learn and remember the effects of transformations, it helps if students actually understand why the rules are what they are. Then, students need to get a lot of practice with each one.
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Teaching Mean Absolute Deviation Like a Rock Star
Mean absolute deviation can sound very intimidating. I remember being in a master’s class and we had to find the standard deviation of some data. Most people in the class had no clue what to do. Most 7th grade math teachers have been teaching math since before the Common Core came on the scene, so this makes mean absolute deviation a new topic for many of us.
If you’re like me, you get worried when there’s a new topic. You want to teach it right, but you’re not confident with how to teach it. At least, not yet. It’s taken me a bit of time to feel comfortable with it, but this year I had so much fun teaching this concept. Let me show you step by step how I broke down and taught my 7th grade students about mean absolute deviation.
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Teaching Absolute Value Through Discovery
In recent years, mean absolute deviation and variability concepts have been added to 7th grade math. It seems like a huge jump from their current understanding to these concepts, but we as teachers always figure out ways to make the content accessible to students. The first time I taught mean absolute deviation I just told the kids that absolute value was the distance a number is from zero. It seems like a simple concept and in my rush to get to the meat of the topic, I left it at that. Well, needless to say, the majority of my students don’t retain information just because I say it a couple of times. I know, I know, teaching lesson learned (again!). Let me share with you how teaching absolute value through discovery made teaching the whole topic of mean absolute deviation and absolute value in general so much easier.
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