There’s no doubt that I was meant to be a middle school teacher. I love zombies, pirates, unicorns, tacos, and avocados. Once I realized that my love for the random was shared by my students, I found a way to relate to them. Some of my students leave the room and tell me to have a nice avocado. It doesn’t really mean anything, but these inside jokes bring my class together When I practicing with real world problems, or word problems, I make sure to add some of that randomness flair to the math situations. We have a fun time solving these dreaded word problems, and it helps students stay engaged. Today I’ll share with you nine go-to strategies and activities that help students practice solving real world problems with equations. [Read more…] about 9 Magical Activities for Real World Equations Problems
7th grade
12 Activities for Practicing Proportions that Pop
It’s crazy to me how much power some of the skills we teach really carry. Getting kids to understand proportions and how to solve for a missing value in proportions is one of those concepts that just keeps showing up. Understanding proportions helps students with so many other concepts. It shows up again when they learn about slope. I feel like the students who understand proportions have a much easier time understanding slope. When I was a kid, I enjoyed finding the patterns in things, and proportions have that type of pattern. Now, I love helping students to understand these patterns and watching the light bulb turn on. In this post I’ll share twelve activities that will definitely help students get the practice they need with proportions. [Read more…] about 12 Activities for Practicing Proportions that Pop
11 Triangle Inequality Theorem Activities That Rock
The triangle inequality theorem is not one of the most glamorous topics in middle school math. It seems to get swept under the rug and no one talks a lot about it. Like most geometry concepts, this topic has a proof that can be learned through discovery. It’s pretty cool when students realize that they can actually figure out if 3 given lines will make a triangle. I love teaching this concept to 7th graders, and I like that it’s not super complicated. Most of my students can get this idea pretty quickly and they enjoy it. I’m excited to share with you 11 activities that will help students get, and remember, the triangle inequality theorem. [Read more…] about 11 Triangle Inequality Theorem Activities That Rock
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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How to Teach Simple Probability through Discovery
As teachers we want our students to discover things, but we also like to be in control. Sometimes we feel like we don’t have enough time to let students discover. We just want to jump in and give them a list of steps. I believe there’s certainly a place for teaching the list of steps, but I’ve also seen the power of discovery and I can’t go back to the days before I used it. Now, I start every unit with a discovery lesson. Some topics call for more involved discovery activities, like volume of cylinders, cones, and spheres. Other topics are less complex like simple probability. In this post I’m going to share the discovery activity I used with my students for simple probability.
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