Idea Galaxy

Adventures in Junior High and Mathematics

I Can Statements

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.

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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

Using I Can Statements in a Math Interactive Notebook

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When Common Core became the standards a few years ago I was also introduced to I Can statements. I was taking some graduate classes at that time for instructional design and we were learning about lesson objectives. The common wisdom is that lesson objectives should have what students would be able to do at the end of the lesson and be measurable. Then, I heard about I Can statements. What struck me as important was how they were written from the point of view of the student. This was very intriguing to me, but I didn’t know what to do with it.

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