Adding Integers

Planned lesson included the following notes:

Students would have had lots of class time to complete both blue practice sheets. 

Have a safe and spooky Halloween weekend. Remember that Sunday morning at 2:00 am, Daylight Savings Time ends; turn your clocks back 1 hour (and change your smoke detector/carbon monoxide detector batteries). See you on Monday, Mrs. Warren

More PEMDAS

Here are the notes from today's class.

Students have two short yellow worksheets in their MTN that is due on Monday.

I will be absent for the next two days at a Math Conference in Portland, ME. Students will be working with "Adding Integers."

Order of Operation

Today, we began taking notes and completed some practice items using PEMDAS.

HOMEWORK: Complete the yellow sheet for Tuesday, 10/27:

I will be absent on Monday, 10/26. The team will be administering the NWEA tests (Reading and Math) on Monday during core class time. The next Blog Post will be on Tuesday, 10/27.

The Next Billion -- Part 2

After reviewing the required components to a proper line graph, students edited their rough drafts and completed a final draft (homework tonight if not completed in class).

Then, I showed the students a cool website that calculates U.S. Population and World Population in the moment. Take a look by clicking onto the link.  Population Clock Link

The Next Billion

The short story, One Grain of Rice by Demi was read to students to demonstrate the enormity of one billion and the power of exponential growth.

Then students followed a series of steps to help predict when we will reach 8 billion people on Earth. We also discussed why these steps were taken as given on the data collection table.

HOMEWORK: Complete a ROUGH DRAFT of the line graph of the above data.

Scientific Notation - Part 2

Here is a copy of today's notes and work that students completed in class. (If you were absent -- see me BEFORE advisory tomorrow morning.)

 

Tomorrow, students will hear a short story (which they will review Elements of Fiction and theme) that is related to exponential growth. Then partners will follow a given series of steps that involve exponents and scientific notation to help answer the question: When will the world population reach 8 billion? Afterwards, each student will complete a line graph with their collected data.  THIS WILL BE AN ASSESSMENT GRADE.

Scientific Notation

After reviewing last night's homework and then taking a quick mini-evaluation, students moved on to scientific notations. We had a discussion about when used, the types of numbers that are represented with scientific notations, and the rules to follow when writing or converting standard numbers and numbers written with scientific notation. On Monday, we will be involved in a math lab where students will investigate ("dig deeper") with the concept of scientific notation.

Here are the notes for homework review and today's notes:

 

HOMEWORK: Complete the above page by Monday.

Properties of Exponents

Here is the homework review answers from last night:

 Today's notes:

Exponents

Students took notes as we discussed and solved situations with exponents. After the notes, students were allowed to work with partners to answer the given tasks. Homework is to finish the yellow sheet. Here are the notes and the items:

 

Processing

Today was a day that we reviewed the activities and the main purposes of this week's activities. We began the discussions of the bulletin board display photos, but were not able to finish. This will be finished on Tuesday. The students, for the most part, were enthusiastic about their research and discoveries. My goal for the BB Display activity is to help students recognize that math is all around us.

Have a safe and relaxing long weekend.  

Rational VS. Irrational Numbers

Prior to taking notes on rational and irrational numbers, students determined how to say and write ratios with numerous items that I had set up around the room. Then students took notes as we discussed extending points.

HOMEWORK: Today, students chose a photo from the bulletin board display. Tonight, students will research one photo (see the "BB Display" tab page for viewing) to determine "what or where is the math" in that photo.

Exponents and Squares

Approximately one third of the team did not finish last night's homework. This causes us to hold back the ability for us to conclude with the ideas from the activity. It is important that everyone finishes the homework tonight in order to have a productive discussion.

In the mean time, we moved on to exponents and squares. A copy of the notes is as follows:

Maze Board & What's Happening Here?

This was part one of working with numbers during class time:

Students attempted to acquire the largest Finish number. Mark S. from the Aquila group acquired the largest team number: 6332.738. Can you find his path? Can you surpass his final answer?

For homework tonight, students must work with a partner from home. The paper is in their MTN and the directions are at the top of the paper. Students MUST generate their own list of numbers first. Student and partner work out the number for and who will complete the work for the slightly smaller than one multiplier and the slightly larger than one multiplier. USE A CALCULATOR.  STUDENTS must answer the 3 questions at the bottom, but are encouraged to discuss with their partner. (Also make sure that all questions are answered on the white sheet -- "Maze Board Record Sheet.")

I have included a couple of student Table of Contents samples:

Problem Solving Methods -- part 3

Here are the problems that the students have been working in partner groupings, then table groupings, and finally as a whole class.

After all the solutions were revealed, students discussed the positive aspects of participating in this type of activity. One observation mentioned by students is the importance of finding patterns in math. Another observation is that there are more than one method to solving a problem. And a third observation was that when something is hard, skip it and try again -- don't give up. These statements indicate skills that the students will be able to apply throughout the school year.  NICELY DONE!!!