IMP Day 10 - Quiz on Patterns and rewrites

Today I gave my classes their POW write-ups on The Broken Eggs back. I found and altered a rubric for grading the write-up but my students didn't have it before they wrote. I did stress to them to address all parts in the write-up explanation in the book. I had some students write the 5 parts on chart paper and hang them in the room for easy reference. It would have been "better practice" for my students to have the rubrics before they wrote. I was sharing this with our Instructional Partner and she gave me the idea to just give them a completion grade on the first writing and give them the rubrics and allow them to "rewrite" their first write-up to make sure they have met all the pieces listed in the rubric. I hope that improvements were made.

I created a quiz that was similar to the questions in the What's Next and Pulling Out Rules activities. I am overall pleased with the results. I am also happy to report that Mr. Webb who is also new to this curriculum told me today that he can really see an increase in students' engagement. Mrs. New was also telling me today that she gave a quiz on exponents today and not one student in 2 classes missed the questions concerning what any number to the zero power equals. She was saying that she does not remember that ever happening before. She also pointed out that she has probably never spent this much time on exponent rules before. If they retain the information it will be worth it!

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!).

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!

IMP Day 1 - What's Next

I added this picture later. The young lady that came up with this explanation for #2 is such a great thinker!

Today I did the What's Next activity with all 3 of my algebra classes. The timeline says it should take 30 minutes but it took much longer than that.  I spent about 15 minutes on intro activities...

1st I asked my 2nd and 3rd block classes what their first impressions of the IMP books were and listed there answers on chart paper so we could revisit them later. Many of the comments had to do with the books being "wordy." They said the content of the book look more like an English book. I did have one student who had already taken the ACT say that the questions reminded him of the ones on the ACT. I had a few students act like they were excited about starting to work in the new books.

2nd I spoke briefly about the forward and the intro to students.

We read through pg. 3 and 4 and then I let the students work. They resisted writing the description of the pattern. I told them to write the description in a way that someone who couldn't see the pattern could write it down as they described it. I had a few students write their descriptions on the board and tried to generate the pattern from their description.  I think this helped them because it forced them to consider telling where to start the pattern and being more specific. We took about an hour for them to generate their answers and us to discuss questions 1-5.

My 5th period 50 min class only got through the first couple of questions.