Well, I learned a lot about blogging this year...most importantly that it's really easy for me to quit blogging! My goal for this blog was to have a record of what students are doing in my class in order to inform parents. I did a great job at the beginning of last year keeping up with it, but it didn't take long before I just got too busy.
I'm going to try to remedy this in 2 ways: 1. I'm going to use Twitter to get the day to day activities out there and save the blog for more of a weekly task. 2. I'm going to eventually have students take over the blog and write about their experiences. Hopefully with these changes I'll do a better job at informing parents of all the amazing math we are doing in class. I'm excited to get to know and work with this group of 7th graders!
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Today we started looking at special pairs of angles, such as supplementary and complementary. The students went to the following Geogebra Activity and made observations about what happened as they moved the angles around This week we've been working a little bit each day on our Problem of the Month. Today, students had their last chance to solve problems and then they created a poster showing either their explanation for the last problem they solved or their status for the problem they are currently working on. Today we started our first Problem of the Month (POM). A POM is a set of 5 problems that are related and increasing in difficulty. Students work for 15-20 minutes a day on the problems for 5 days. On the last day, we share our thinking on the problems as well as view how other students solved them.
The rest of the class, students worked more on building and unbuilding equations in order to solve for x. This first week back after winter break, we've been working on our expressions and equations unit. On our block day we discussed equations and how they are built. We started with the simplest of equations; for example: x=5. Then we performed operations to the x until we created a more complex equation. In 7th grade students aren't expected to be able to solve equations this complex, but if they have a good understanding of how the equations were built using the order of operations, they would be able to solve even more complex equations! Here is an example of how students were able to work backwards to solve an equation: Step 1: Start with an equation: Step 2: Figure out the steps it took to build the equation: Step 3: Undo the equation by working backwards: Step 4: Substitute the solution in for x and check to make sure it works! Today, students finished up or made corrections on their credit card projects if needed and we did a quick summary about what they learned.
Then, they did some graphical analyzing looking at U.S. consumer spending patterns over the past 10 years, as well as making predictions about the future. Why do you think the graphs look the way they do? Wow, the students had a great time on Monday with their brand new credit cards! Unfortunately, today the bill came in the mail. It was time to start paying off the damage. We had some great conversations in our classes today. We discussed:
Here is a sample of how they paid off their credit cards: This was done in google classroom, so each students' project can be found there.
This week are are talking about credit cards! Today, we talked a bit about how credit cards advertise. Students shared credit card advertisements they've seen recently and what the message of the ad was. We narrowed down the messages to: 1. Our card gives you rewards! 2. Our card has the fewest black out dates for travel rewards! 3. Our card is convenient! 4. Our card has lots of digital features! 5. Our card has great identity theft protection! After we discussed the ads, I was pleased to inform the students that they were pre approved for their own LVCS MasterCard with a $5,000 spending limit! Wow, were they excited! They were even more excited when they found out they were going to get to do some online shopping today!!! Students created a google doc to keep track of items they wanted to purchase, where they can purchase the item and how much the item costs (including tax and shipping if applicable.) There wasn't tons of time to shop today, so I asked them to finish up for homework. Today we worked on a problem involving different sized packages of Goldfish and comparing their unit prices. In this problem, they look at ratios in many ways: ratio tables, graphing and unit rates.
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June 2016
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