Day 146 & 147 - Scaling Candy Wrappers

7th Grade Core Math

For this 2-day mini-project students were given the option of working with a partner or working individually.  They also had the option of scaling their candy wrapper (their own or one provided by me) on paper or on the sidewalk using chalk.  For most groups, it took most of a full period to just draw the enlarged grid.  Those using chalk had a particularly hard time once they realized that the grid needed to be at least 5 ft x 5 ft to have adequate space inside each cell to draw.  Needless to say, there were some problems with students' ability to stay focused throughout the project.  I will do this project again, but with a slight modification.  

NOTE:  I have a deaf-ed para during second period and she LOVED scaling the Minion so much she enlarged it TWICE, both in color!  One of my students, who I have a hard time keeping engaged, took her paper home and made the beautiful Skittles drawing below.

Algebra

We spent the last two days exploring exponential functions using the Teacher Activities on Desmos.  I was happily surprised at how much fun they had with the Polygraph: Exponentials game.  I originally expected to only play for 25 minutes before moving to my Exponential Regression activity.  Instead I listened and enjoyed all of the terrific vocabulary being used throughout the room.  They have asked the last two days to play again!  These two days saw them make great strides in understanding how an exponential function behave on a coordinate grid, vocabulary, and even a bit of exponential regression (some struggled with this because it isn't as easy as linear regression).

Day 145 - SBA Practice Test

Day 145 - SBA Practice Test

We interrupt your learning in order to prepare you to take a test...

Day 144 - A New Beginning

I decided that after a long absence, I'd return to this blog, but with a new look and purpose.  I want to first dedicate time to blogging every day in the form of #Teach180/#Math180 posts.  I want to document what I am doing, save links, give credit to to teachers on Twitter (mostly members of the #MTBoS) whose blogs I read and ideas I use/steal!  Mostly these posts will be short with images from my day-to-day teaching (7th grade math & algebra).

7th Grade - Scale Drawings

I decided to turn today's lesson into a partner game of Pictionary (sort of).  I described for students how to draw my shapes by "moves" on grid paper.  Verbal directions only, no affirmations, just repeating directions.  Could my students draw my shapes?  After two tries, they paired up, drew their own image (with a minimum of 3 diagonal lines) and took turns describing their "moves."

Tomorrow they will take this image of a Minion and attempt to scale up the image onto 1 inch x 1 inch grid paper.  

Algebra - Graphing Exponential Functions
In algebra, our focus is split on preparing for the SBA exam next month and wrapping up our understanding of exponential functions.  For most of my algebra students, the content on the SBA was from last year and they really want to do well so nearly half of each period is dedicated to three SBA-like problems.

For exponential equations, I asked my students to graph a variety of equations in the form y = 10*1.5^x so they can observe things like how growth, decay, asymptote, & y-intercepts behave.