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
Math Teaching Tips
12 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 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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12 Engaging Activities for Mean Absolute Deviation
I’ll be the first to admit that when the concept of mean absolute deviation was added to our standards, I didn’t know what it was. Of course, I’ve worked with standard deviation and mean, but I was a newbie to this concept of MAD. As I’ve wrapped my head around it, I’ve learned it enhances other concepts students are learning, and it’s taught as part of helping students to understand variability. In this post I’m sharing with you 12 engaging activities for teaching mean absolute deviation (MAD) to help your students really get it.
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Exploring Compound Probability Through Discovery
What are the chances your students will forget what they learn about probability? It’s an uncomfortable truth that they often forget things that they’ve studied in class. But, they’re much more likely to forget if they don’t build schema and connections with this concept. So, I’m excited to share with you my favorite way to do just that. Discovery labs give you one way that help your students to build background and ultimately remember what they learn about compound probability (wanna read more how I got started with discovery labs? Read that story here.)
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