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.