We finished Friday's work on distributive property. It was pretty interesting to work through - there's still a lot of learning to be done. We went over what like terms were again and how to multiply variables together. I worked on my wait time and on trying to find the good in all their answers while still moving them forward.
Today's warm up was their very first Which One Doesn't Belong? We practiced on the logo to ensure that they all knew how this worked - there is at least one reason for each member of the set to not belong.
Then we did today's actual warm up. I loved their answers, but even more, I loved their attitude. They actually clapped when an interesting answer was given. Twice. It was so lovely. And one of my quieter students volunteered to share an answer, which was also a great moment.
Our "Recall" for today was adding and subtracting fractions. Well, we didn't even finish all of that, let alone look at exponents again! Here's what we did:
I distributed graph paper to those who did not have any. I made them stop talking about common denominators and think about a visual model. There were all kinds of models - circles and rectangles and squares. It was a mess. There were a few really good ones too, and they helped us get to this:
They shared a number of strategies for finding the lowest common denominator and I shared mine with them.
And that's when the bell rang. Understanding fractions is huge so I think it's worth spending a little time to ensure that they get the basics. We'll continue with more tomorrow, and maybe we'll even get back to those exponents!
Along the way today, one of my students said to me "Have you ever talked to a mathematician about infinity?" We finished the joke in unison: "They could go on forever!".
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