After handing back feedback forms, I asked students to take out, but not hand in their homework (they normally hand it in at the beginning of each class, I check it somewhere along the way and return it before the end of class). I asked whether they knew that the answers were in the back of the book and this was news to many! So together we found the answers and I had them check their answers and place a check mark or x next to each question using a different coloured pen. Then they handed it in to me. This simplifies my job as it became very clear whether they struggled with any of the questions. Sometimes we forget the soft skills so I am trying to be deliberate in imparting them to my students.
Instead of a warm up today, I gave a quiz on integers. I realized last night (it was our school's open house so I was here until 8 pm) that I have no firm evidence that my students are understanding the material we have looked at thus far. I made sure to explain to them that they shouldn't be stressed about it, that it would help me know if we need to spend more time on integers or if we are ready to move on.
After the quiz we carried on where we left off yesterday - like terms.
The next question sounds like a Marian Small question so I will give her credit. My students did well with answering it, but we had to work hard to explain what everyone's answers would have in common.
Then we practiced combining like terms and dealing with the many misconceptions that came up along the way.
I loved the multiple ways of writing the solution to this next example.
We skipped today's visual pattern, in part because the teacher next door had borrowed my cards, and in part because I wanted to get everyone feeling a little more comfortable with the distributive property before the weekend. We worked through area models with numbers then added a variable. A big thank you to Sheri Walker for sharing this handout with me. Students who were unsure were encouraged to count the number of x tiles to get the area and then try to make sense of that answer in terms of length and width.
We continued to build up our area models and were careful about including brackets when writing out the length x width expressions.
A little summary and some more examples (I know this is not very exciting - I would change this to become work on whiteboards next time. Actually I can do some of that next class.)
We had a few more to do, but it was the end of the period so that's the end of the first week.
Today started with a warm up and the small whiteboards.
Again, there were many different answers so we went over a few things. We talked about what the dot means and why it is used and a little about order of operations - that multiplication happens before addition or subtraction. Then we did a little recall on multiplying with integers.
We went back to the warm up and I gave them a minute or two to check their work before we took it up.
I took out my playing cards and they created groups for today's visual pattern. They worked on the whiteboards and are slowly getting better at showing the link between the pattern and the algebraic expression. Here is one sample and the sample solution I showed them.
Next we moved on to the activity that we didn't have time for yesterday. I had prepared a brown paper bag with algebra tiles for each pair of students.
We went over what each tile represented before they tried this out. It seemed to solidify the concept of zero pairs pretty well.
Next we did a more formal lesson on like terms. Well, we started. We didn't get through everything and I have to remember that rushing through material serves no one. If I try to think positively, I have part of my lesson for tomorrow ready to go!
We did example 1 as a class - it was a good consolidation of the activity they had just done.
We defined like terms and started on the next example which produced some really good discussion.
And that's all for today. I know we are doing a lot each day so I need to consider whether I need to make some adjustments to my plan to provide a little more breathing room.
