Adventures in Junior High and Mathematics
There are many reasons people make the move from paper-based to digital notes. In the 202-21 school year, more teachers than ever are making the move due to absolute necessity.
The good news is that if you’ve been using paper-based interactive notebooks, using digital notes mirrors traditional paper-based notes in most ways. However, there are a few tips to consider when implementing digital notes.
[Read more…] about 10 Tips for Using Digital NotesLately, I’ve been spending a lot of time converting our interactive notebooks into digital math notes. You could say that I eat, drink, and sleep digital interactive notebooks. This has been sooo fun! (nerd fun)
I’ve used interactive notebooks as an anchor to my teaching for years, but I was a skeptic about digital notes. However, as I’ve been converting my notes to digital, I see so many benefits to digital notes. So, let me share some features that make digital notes awesome!
[Read more…] about Why I’m Loving Digital Math NotesWhen we talk about comparing functions in 8th grade math, we’re really focusing on slope and y-intercept in multiple representations. I’ve found that it can become very confusing and complicated for students if we go too fast or if we skip over key information. Because teaching students to compare functions has so many parts for students to understand, this unit is one that takes more time than most.
Overall, we want students to be able to read graphs, tables, coordinate points, equations, and written descriptions and identify the slope and y-intercept in all those forms by the end of the unit. So, how do we introduce all of this? In this post I’ll break down step-by-step what this unit looks like in my students’ interactive notebooks. [Read more…] about How to Teach Comparing Functions with Interactive Notebooks
We introduce the word “functions” to students in 8th grade math. They, of course, have worked with functions in earlier grades. However, functions were previously referred to as input/output tables. Often teachers show input/output tables as a machine with a rule giving students their first introduction to the topic. But just because students should have some background with the concept of functions, it definitely doesn’t mean that you don’t have to teach this topic to students. They need to have a deeper understanding of functions before going into comparing functions and unit rates later on. Today I’m sharing with you the step by step way that I use interactive notebooks to introduce functions and activate students’ prior knowledge. By the end of this unit, students are prepared for other 8th grade topics with functions.
[Read more…] about How to Teach Functions with Interactive Notebooks
Students come into my math class with some sort of background with scatter plots. They generally have an understanding of how graphs work, so identifying if the graph has a positive, negative, or no correlation is pretty simple for them to figure out. It probably helps that we teach this topic after they’ve had an extensive introduction to slope. Overall, interpreting scatter plot graphs may be the easiest topic that we teach all year. It’s fairly intuitive, and builds naturally on the slope concepts students study in 8th grade. In this post I’ll break down all of the notes I use to teach students to read and interpret scatter plots and bivariate data in our interactive notebooks. [Read more…] about Teaching Scatter Plots and Bivariate Data with Interactive Notebooks
