IMP Day 8 - Keeping it Going, POW presentations

Today was a little crazy. We started our classes with the Keeping It Going activity. It was unique in that it combines the problems we did in the beginning where we are given a sequence of terms and asked to identify the pattern and find the next 3 terms with the problems where you are given an In-Out table and are asked to write the rule. Then we are asked to create an equation that works for the nth term. The easiest way to do this (in my opinion) is to create a table where the input is the term number and the output is the term itself. I had told my algebra teaching buddies earlier this year that I needed "tutoring" on teaching sequences. I had never thought of creating a table in this way before in order to help students to write a rule for a sequence where the variable represents the term number.

Today I had one group from each class present their solution for The Broken Eggs POW. One of the groups did especially well. There were 4 students and 3 out of the 4 talked about the approaches they used to solve the problem. Every one of them mentioned a strategy that had not been mentioned in class discussions. We had brought out in class that the answer had to end in a 1 but one student took that a step further to say that you had to multiply 7 by a number ending with a 3 in order to generate a product ending in 1. Another student actually wrote down times tables for the numbers 2-7 so he could compare the products. A third student mentioned that he created a table to organize his thoughts. The 4th student gave the solution. He was pretty shy about it as he is just not as confident in his math ability as the other 3 are. I gave them a few minutes to talk about how they were going to present their POW and gave them the idea to talk about their different approaches. This was a good group because 3 of the students really did set out independently (in their own ways) to start finding the solution. Sometimes you have a group where 1 or 2 students have a little bit of an idea how to work toward an answer and the other 2 or 3 are just waiting for the "better math students" to figure it out. In my opinion this is one of the biggest challenges of letting the students work in groups. However, those struggling math students would probably not be finding their way to solutions by themselves. So often they don't even have the confidence to try.

I have not yet figured out how I am going to assign grades for their presentations. I would like for the students to have measurable goals but I have not yet figured out how I am going to assign grades. I did create a rubric for their Broken Eggs Write-Up (or rather I googled it and found one that I altered a little to fit my needs - gotta love Google AND the people who share their material!).

IMP Day 7 ...kind of

Today we had a vertical alignment workshop. In the hopes of keeping us moving along in our new books I made some fill-in-the-blank items for the students to complete as they read through the material that introduces the Overland Trail activities. I felt so accomplished! Then, when I returned from our half-day workshop I learned that the substitute (who is an awesome lady) did not find the copies that I had left. What a bummer! It is a long story...and it really doesn't matter. I used my wonderful REMIND app and sent a message to the students who did not get the assignment for them to come by before they left today. Some of them did. Many of them did not. I will give them until Friday to turn it in.

Tomorrow I am going to have one group from each class present their findings for The Broken Eggs. Then we are going to watch an intro video for The Overland Trail and start work on creating our families. Mrs. New and I "shared our brains" (again) today and came up with a chart to help the students keep up with each of their families. The charts will hopefully make it easier for us to check to see if they have used the constraints properly.  I hope this activity "hooks" the rest of the nonbelievers into liking the new books. I did have a student ask me today when we started doing history in math class. I told him that we are doing some cross-curricular work that will make the math more MEANINGFUL. I'm not sure he is buying in yet...but I'm still working on him.

On another note...our PD today involved getting on a bus and riding through our school district. Although I was mostly aware of the living conditions of many of our students there were a few surprises today. I tell my students all the time that I grew up in Mayberry (I'm pretty sure they have no clue what I mean but at least there are still reruns of the Andy Griffith Show!). Today was a much-needed reminder that I can NOT compare my childhood experiences and school experiences with the majority of my students. God help me to help each student to feel loved and valued by me.

On another random note...we had our first TEDEd Club meeting today. Wow it sure was short! I am very excited about sponsoring this club at our school and look forward to being inspired by our students!

Day 6 IMP - Pulling Out Rules

Today my classes finished their in-class time for writing their POW Write-ups. Then we did the Pulling Out Rules activity. I was a little disappointed in my students' lack of persistence on finding the rules. A few of them got 1 or 2 of the first 3 but none of them got them all. I may have rushed through this activity a little bit. After giving the students about 15 minutes I had them share their answers within their groups. They are very reluctant to find patterns where you have to multiply then SUBTRACT for some reason. I asked for volunteers to share each answer and after the volunteering was over I assigned the last few problems to the remaining groups.

We also went over all of the vocabulary mentioned in the patterns activities. I did this in a very brief manner. I think I will give a quiz grade for the POW write-up and then give another brief quiz on Friday on finding patterns and writing function rules.

My 5th period class did Who's Who today. They did well with the activity. For some reason fewer of the students in this class started by drawing a diagram which seems like the easiest way to approach this problem. It is not like they were getting the answer WITHOUT drawing the diagram. They just sat there with nothing on their paper. I asked the class what they thought they could do to start organizing this information. One of the groups mentioned drawing a diagram. Since this was my favorite method they were the "group of the day!" I'm just kidding. However, they did find the solution first. Coincidence? I think not!

Reflections on Week 1 of IMP curriculum

The activities that I have done this week with my students were designed to get them used to the new curriculum and improve their confidence.  I think that more than that I have been able to ease into the curriculum as a teacher. I see that I have already done more of these things in one week than I did in the previous 7 combined:

• Teach problem solving skills but NOT by telling them how to problem solve! The students were given a task and then as they figured out how to get closer to a solution I had them share with the class. I asked them to explain how they came up with the idea. I did often repeat  them and use more technical  math vocab but this was exciting to see them generate their own ways to approach tasks.
• Have students think about the process of solving a problem and write in complete  sentences. They were asked to explain the process and write the solution in a complete sentence. This also helps me to cover literacy standards. 
• Help students realize that math is not just about finding an answer and moving to the next problem. The way the curriculum presents the activities the idea that there can often be more than one valid answer is driven home, especially when the students can explain their reasoning. (We have been working on patterns and finding rules for function tables.)

IMP Day 5 - Calculator Exploration...and The Broken Eggs

On Day 5 I chose to go ahead and do the Calculator Exploration with my classes. I was very tempted to skip it because we are going to have to trim some items in the books since we are starting 7 weeks late. However, it was a Friday and I thought the students might enjoy it. What is funny is they taught me things about the TI-83 calculators that I didn't know. I have never played with any of the Apps and of course this generation is all about Apps. I also learned how to dim and brighten the screen AND how to convert decimals to fractions and vice versa. I asked at the end of class how many students were more excited about our new books now that they realize that they will get to use the graphing calculators and about 5 or 6 raised their hands. That is improvement. Right now many of the students are not happy with our new books because they are more wordy and they are required to explain and describe their reasoning more. The way the curriculum is written we will EASILY be meeting our new literacy standards. I am excited about the amount of reflection and explaining that the book asks for because I was interested in having my students journal anyway. I just have a hard time implementing journals in my classroom.  After the calculator exploration I gave my students time to start writing their POW write up for The Broken Eggs.

Thursday I had a student in my 5th period class tell me that he had come up with a way to find an endless number of solutions to The Broken Eggs. He told me verbally but he lost me! I told him to write it down and put it on my desk (the bell was about to ring). He had written down to take the previous answer, multiply it by 2, and then add 119. I used 301 as the "previous answer" and used his method and it worked. I went and showed Sonya New to see if she could help me figure out how he came up with it. We were stumped! When he came to class on Friday I asked him to explain. He said that he found 301 by adding 7 over and over again. The class had already discussed that the answer had to be an odd multiple of 7. This young man had also decided that the number had to end with a 1 because to have 1 left over when putting the eggs in packages of 5 the number had to end in a 6 or a 1 and since the number had to be odd it had to end with a 1. So...he kept adding 7 until he came to the next multiple of 7 that ended in a 1 and it was 721. Then he said he was just playing with the numbers and decided to multiply 301 by 2 to see how close it was and it was 119 away. Then he decided to try to double 721 and add 119 to see if it worked to generate another solution and it did. WOW! That seems so random to me. I am still amazed.

IMP Day 4 - Discussion of Inside Out and class challenge

Today I had the groups share their answers to their Inside Out assignment. I did things as lined out in the teacher guide except  when we went over number 6 and they were picking their in-out tables I told them if they stumped me I would give them the rest of the period off. Boy...they sure did work hard on their tables.

**I forgot to mention this when I originally posted this entry. I noticed that MANY of my students read the In-Out tables vertically instead of from In to Out. In other words, instead of stating a rule where something was being "done" to the in to get the out they would say each of the inputs are going up by 2 and each of the outputs are going up by 4...or something like that. I would congratulate them on finding a pattern that worked for the table but remind them that our task was to find the relationship between the In and the Out. I wonder how I could do a better job describing that in the future? Even when I realized the issue in my 2nd block class and tried to stress to my 3rd block to find the horizontal relationship between the inputs and the outputs I still had some do it vertically.

Today we talked with one of the IAT  trainers and she gave us some ways to move through the material a little faster since we started 7 weeks into the year. Some of her ideas were to split the assignment between  the groups. The other was to only do the formal POW write-up for one POW per unit.

#bloggingwhileatthepark

IMP Day 3 - POW write up discussion, Who's Who, Inside Out

Today I started class by going over the 5 parts of the POW write up. I enjoyed being able to talk about the real world connections to scientists,  chemists,  teachers, managers,  inventors, etc... I'm loving how this curriculum is definitely helping us to address literacy standards!  After the POW discussion they did the Who's Who activity.  They did very well with this and I had someone come to the board and draw their diagram as I read the description.  I also questioned them as if I didn't understand.  We talked about the different approaches they took...some just recorded their thoughts in sentences but most drew a diagram.

Presenting her diagram and solution for Who's Who

The last activity we did today was Inside Out. I loved how the teacher's guide suggested you start with a mystery function.  I had fun with that! I also like the way the activity asks the students to describe the function in words.  I probably would have jumped ahead to writing an expression.

The thing I am most excited about is that my colleagues are getting excited about the new books and curriculum.  My previously unnamed teacher buddy who has always made me want to be a better teacher...Sonya New... (I asked her permission to use her name...lol) says that the IMP curriculum is like riding a roller coaster.  She has some challenging classes behavior wise and she was ready to throw in the towel yesterday but today was terrific.  Mr. Webb...the other teacher I "coerced" into this new adventure was telling us today how his student engagement is much better. AND Ms. Whitt said she didn't think she would like the curriculum when she first looked at it but she really likes it. What a good day!

I just hope the students are really learning something! Will they remember these problem solving skills and use them later? Will they make higher test scores due to this new way of teaching? Will they learn algebra? Really learn it???? Time will tell.