Grade 9 Academic - Day 10

Today started with another WODB? In my haste to hit publish yesterday (it was a very long day), I didn't talk about how I run WODB in my classroom. I ask for 60 seconds of absolute silence for everyone to think about what they see. This is hard for them. I then have them share their reasons in their table groups before we consolidate as a whole class. Each group gets to share one reason then we get extra reasons once each of the 6 groups has had a turn. In this case the 1/20 was blank until the end. They came up with a couple of ideas and then someone impressed the class by using something they had just seen. Taking the reciprocal (that had come up with 20/25) turned 1/20 into a whole number. Along the way we talked about vocabulary and made connections (i.e. numerator > denominator is the same as improper fraction).

After the warm up we returned to yesterday's work. We did one more addition/subtraction of fractions question before reviewing how to turn a mixed fraction into an improper fraction.

They, as expected, came out with the trick where you multiply the denominator by the whole part and add the numerator. I used that on the next example and got -13/5. We decided that my answer didn't make sense and talked about how to convert a negative mixed fraction into an improper fraction.

After our review work with fractions, we finally circled back to exponent laws.

I think it's really important to make sure that everyone understands what the outside exponent means in a question like the one below. We wrote the power in expanded form first and used the product of powers law and then used the power of a power law to do the same question in a different way.

We did another one two ways. There were a lot of questions that arose along the way. Cubing one-third was a challenge!

I circulated and gave out stickers as they worked through the next example. I saw that some students got a coefficient of 686. They explained to me what they had done but I'm still a little lost. I think we cleared up how to do it correctly...

The last one combined a lot of skills. 

We spent the rest of the class taking up yesterday's quiz. I only give feedback on quizzes (no mark/grade) so I asked them to spend a couple of minutes correcting the first question with the help of their notes/neighbours. It was all about terms - type of polynomial, state the coefficients, state the constant, state the degree of the polynomial). We then corrected it together. The big error that I saw was a number of students who changed every x^2 into 2x. We talked about the difference between the two.

Have I mentioned recently that I really love this class? In a happy, exhausted kind of way.