Reflections after 5 weeks of IMP Meaningful Math Algebra

1.  I can no longer walk in and wing it...effectively. To get everything out of a lesson  (that the authors intend) one must study over the teacher's guide first. The guides are so much different than the typical teacher's edition!
   **Later revision - this sounds bad, I know. I also know that "on the real" I am not the only teacher that hits "spells" where my life (at school and with my family) gets so crazy and busy that I can not put the planning time into my school lessons that I would like. This past week has been that way for me. 
2.  I am not going to be able to get the "big picture" until I have taught through the book once. 
3. Grading is so strange. I haven't quite figured out how to grade effectively using this curriculum.  I know I can still give "normal" quizzes but... it is harder to identify good places for quizzes...and they aren't really recommended...
4. Since almost every activity has a context you can spend forever on them if you want to...
5. It is easy to get frustrated when things are so unfamiliar.
6. Referencing back to #3...because the way grading is done so differently I feel unsure about where my students stand.  I ask them to explain a lot...I think I know where they stand...I think they are learning...look at the picture of an excerpt from a POW write-up 

Things I know I'm doing better than before IMP...

1. Addressing literacy standards
2. Teaching how to solve word problems
3. Stretching the students (especially with POWs)
4. Questioning...there are always suggested questions in the teacher's guide. 
5. Making real-world applications
6. Celebrating various approaches to problems...I find that since there really isn't a mathematical title to the lesson (i.e. Percent Increase or Systems of Equations, etc...) that students tend to take more varying approaches to problems.  Also...I don't say to students as a form of a hint..."Hey guys. ..look at the title of the section!" (I really used to do that sometimes.) 

**I love #6 because no problem we face in the real world comes with a title that gives you a hint on how to solve it:)

IMP Day 17 - Shoelaces and Diagonals Illuminated and Creating Families (5th period)

Today I handed out my rubric for the Haybaler POW and then gave (through questioning and getting really excited when someone got close) them the hint that two of the bales are 39 and 41. HINT HINT HINT! Some of my students still didn't take the hint!

Then we read the intro to Setting Out with Variables and did the Shoelaces activity. I really liked this activity! Jim had warned us in training that many of the students were going to forget to calculate for 2 shoes in each pair and he was right! Reading the teacher's guide is VERY IMPORTANT for this activity because it has you lead the students through assigning variables and coming up with an algebraic expression for the amount of shoelaces each family needs to buy. *Family folders are needed for this activity because they figure how much they need for their own family first.* Then we talked about substitution...  Having not taught out of this book before I keep being anxious to see when the topic is going to be revisited. I know that the topics spiral but I wish I had time to investigate and see how they deepen as they go. Ain't nobody got time for that!!  (not right now anyway)

The next activity we did was Diagonals Illuminated. This activity revisits In-Out tables and creating a rule.

My 5th period started Creating Families today. I used Jim's method of grouping them randomly using playing cards and then assigning the type of family by suits. They relocated and worked on their families in the "new" groups so that they were working with the same constraints. I liked this much better than the way I did it with my 2nd and 3rd blocks.

I have also taken some advice from Theodora Psitos (a trainer with It's About Time) and started posting the definitions from the unit on chart paper. Today I would pause every time I came to one of the vocabulary words and point to the definition for them to read to me. I hope it helps!

Popcorn reading seems to work even though they groan a little when we start using it. I also find myself getting impatient and just reading it myself...ALOT. I noticed when we were in training and I was in "student mode" it took me several reads for the info to sink in. I figure that they don't pay great attention to detail the first time through anyway so I speed read to hurry up the process. #trueconfessions    I do read slower on the most important parts. Wow...today I really rambled!

O yea!! We received the teaching kits from It's About Time last week for the PD. In the kit there were 2 books about the Oregon Trail and I read excerpts to my classes today. I didn't read long but it was fun. The book I read from has a collection of journals from the perspective a 15-year-old boy. I plan to read a little every day.

IMP Days 14-16 - Graphing Stories, Haybaler, and The Search for Dry Trails

Last week during our PD my students worked on graphing stories on pg. 42-47. I really had fun teaching graphing stories earlier in the year. After going over a few of the videos on graphingstories.com I had my students complete some graphing stories worksheets that Lori White shared with me at AMSTI training this year. The graphs were the same as some I have used previous years but she had places for them to explain why one choice was correct and the other 3 were wrong. This approach gave us the opportunity to discuss the details of every single graph. THEN (my favorite part) we checked out the Ipads and we went outside to let them film their own graphing stories. The majority of them did some kind of flip or cartwheel. In those cases I had them to graph the relationship between the distance of their feet off the ground and time. The coolest one was one where 3 students were standing on a 2 foot wall and one student stayed on the wall and the other 2 flipped at different times. Then one jumped back on the wall and then back down to the ground. We graphed all three on the same coordinate plane in different colors. I think the students had almost as much fun as I did. I wish I would have made some of them bounce a ball and film it. One group did drop a pencil. This was a VERY fun activity. When the students finished graphing I played the video and we critiqued the graph as a class. This activity helped us to set the tone of "Mistakes are okay in here. Let's just learn how to correct them!"

Okay...back to the IMP curriculum...I made the graphing stories assignment for them to do while I was in PD because they should have been able to understand how to do them after the extensive time I have already spent teaching it (prior to using our new books).

Today I gave my students close to 30 minutes to continue working on the Haybaler POW. The one question I have kept asking my students is whether or not any 2 bales can have the same weight. Today, after encouraging them to just start testing values, I had one person in each of my 2 classes to realize that none of the hay bales could have the same weight because there are no 2 sums that are the same. I thought they would NEVER come to that on their own! I have also now had a couple of groups to come up with a solution.

The Search for Dry Trails really does not take long to go over. The students came up with their answers fairly quickly and we had a discussion and went over the definitions for mean and median. I ended up giving them additional time on Haybaler because we finished "The Search" so quickly.