Grade 10 Applied Math, February - June 2016

At some point during this semester I said I would blog about what I did with my grade 10 applied class. I have spiralled this course for a number of years now and felt that it was time to change things up a bit. Here is my attempt to remember what I did and why. Firstly though, here is the Google sheet that I used to plan and record what I would be doing during each cycle. There are pictures of the cycles included below.

The first big change I made this time around was to start with trig. I have found that starting with 26-squares did not pose enough of a challenge to some students who decided right away that they didn't need to do any work in this course and behaviour issues ensued. Trig, being new to all students, was a great way to see how they learned and dealt with new content. I also introduced sine, cosine and tangent right away. I used to wait until cycle 3, but found that students tried to pick it up and then forgot how to use the tables. I taught with both trig tables and SOH-CAH-TOA the entire way through the course, and students generally chose one way and stuck with it.

Another change I made had to do with warm-ups. I still did them daily, but I created them as we worked through the course so that they would connect more with the content, either as practice for what we were doing or as lagged practice for a topic that we hadn't looked at for a bit. Here are this semester's warmups. There are no warmups for weeks 6 and 12 because I was testing those weeks.

Here is a look at cycle 2:

Here is a look at cycle 3:

And end-of-year stuff:

I didn't make any other major changes, but did try to spend a bit longer on each topic in cycle 2. I am sure I added a few new things but when you wait several days or weeks to blog about them, you forget. Well, at least I do. If there is anything that you want to know more about, please get in touch!