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Adventures in Junior High and Mathematics

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Teaching Tax, Tips, Discounts, and Interest using I Can Statements

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Teaching about tax, tip, discounts and interest is a fun, real world topic. As I was teaching it I noticed that my 7th graders don’t actually know much about spending money. Their money spending experience is very limited and that led to some pretty awesome conversations. Like most topics, they entered the learning as essentially blank canvases. I love topics like this because they don’t have a whole lot of misconceptions when we start learning. So, to get started with planning this unit, I first chunked out the unit by writing our learning goals as “I Can” statements. These become the backbone of my lesson planning and guide us through the lesson and practice (check out 8 Tax, Tips, and Discounts Activities).

Everything starts with the answer to the question, “What do I want my students to be able to know and do?” Below I will share how I used “I Can” statements to chunk out the learning for working with tax, tips, and discounts.

[Read more…] about Teaching Tax, Tips, Discounts, and Interest using I Can Statements

9 Operations with Scientific Notation Activities

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Are you looking for ways to practice operations with scientific notation? You’re in the right place. In this post I’ll share 9 10 practice activities you can immediately use in your classroom that support students effort in learning how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract numbers written in scientific notation.

You can also read more about how to plan out the teaching for this topic, or how to introduce operations with scientific notation through a discovery activity in two other posts I’ve written about teaching operations with scientific notation.  [Read more…] about 9 Operations with Scientific Notation Activities

Teaching Operations with Scientific Notation through Discovery

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After introducing students to scientific notation and converting from standard to scientific notation, it was time to move on to using the four operations with scientific notation. Once I chunked out the learning targets with “I Can” statements, I was ready to get things started. With this new topic, I again wanted to start with a discovery lab. I find my students so much more engaged over the whole unit when we start off with an introduction that asks students to discover first, before formal instruction. It gets them curious, which makes them much more invested in their own learning. I’m excited to share with you just how we started off this unit teaching operations with scientific notation through discovery. [Read more…] about Teaching Operations with Scientific Notation through Discovery

Teaching Operations with Scientific Notation

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Teaching operations with scientific notation has been a tough topic for me to teach in the past. I feel like every time I teach something it becomes easier and easier to teach. I learn from the students what works and what doesn’t. As I teach I also learn nuances about the topic that help me to support my students better. Teaching how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract two numbers that are in scientific notation lives as one of the greatest example of this process for me. [Read more…] about Teaching Operations with Scientific Notation

8 Scale Drawing Activities

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Looking for ideas on teaching scale drawings? You’re in the right place! Scale drawings can be so much fun for students, and they’re definitely a fun way to look at math. In this post you’ll find 8 engaging scale drawing activities to practice in your classroom. For even more scale drawing ideas & tips, check out this post about using I Can Statements to break down teaching scale drawings. Or, for a guide to introducing scale drawings through discovery & interactive notes, check out this post. The eight scale drawing activities below include independent practice opportunities, technology-based tools, review games, and enrichment activities. Let’s dig in! [Read more…] about 8 Scale Drawing Activities