Sunday, July 3, 2011

July 4th already?!

Ok,so it's not July 4th. But it is the 3rd! I normally see this holiday as the beginning of the end. I mean, summer's virtually over! But I can't complain. I'm currently sitting outside, typing on my iPad, watching the kids play on the Slip-n-Slide. The only thing that could better is if I had a beer...and the fridge is awfully close!

The kids and I are going to my grandparents's cottage for the week with my folks. There's not a lot to do there, so a lot of time is spent lying around, reading books, and just basically wasting time. I decided that I'm going to take a couple of schoolbooks (along with my no-brainer fictions) and my laptop and actually get some planning done!

I had some thoughts at church today (I know, I know. Probably not the best time to be thinking and taking notes about school!) that I wanted to get down on paper to help me think about further.

(My son just asked if bats can walk. The things that go through his head!)

In Honors Algebra 1:
1. Set up some weekly "special" days. How about "Warm-up Wednesdays" and "Fraction
Fridays"? If Friday happens to be a test or quiz day then they'll show up there instead. For the warm-ups, I'm going to incorporate them into more of a daily thing, but I'll make Wednesdays fun, like a brain teaser or something more extended.

2. Notebooks. I've always encouraged the kids to keep a notebook, but for the past few years I've strayed from doing anything about them. When dealing with these freshmen, though, I think it's important to get them off on the right foot. Now I just need to decide how to "do" them. Collect and check every chapter? Every other chapter? Every quarter?

3. Projects. I would like to set up some quarterly-themed research projects for the kids to present. Maybe something like Math in Careers, Algebra Topics, etc. I'd like to offer a variety of ways to present (like video, song, board game, prezi, PowerPoint) and schedule 2-3 a week. There's only 22 kids in the class, so the scheduling should work out ok.

In CP Algebra 2:
Aside from the projects, I'd like to repeat the stuff with the warm-ups and notebooks. With the warm-ups, though, I'd start with Fraction Fridays and transition to Factor Fridays.

In Honors Precalc:
I'm still struggling. What do I want to do? I'd love to make this a more individualized class, but with 3 classes of 30ish that could be tough.

And the big question is what do I want to do with sbg? I would like to incorporate some of the aspects of it (especially since we have math tutors during the day that I could give the reassessments to for kids who sign up to take) but I'm not ready to abandon the book organization of topics and such. Something more to think about over the next few weeks!

1 comment:

druin said...

Random thoughts...

Could you do a different theme per day? Like Mind-Bender Monday, T____ Tuesday, etc?

Notebooks and I don't get along. Each kid organizes differently and I hate grading them. I totally see their benefit, but I dread seeing piles for me to grade :( I used to take them up every chapter and they had a table of contents with a checkbox for me to check. Then each chapter packet went into their binder in reverse chronological order.

As for SBG, you don't have to lose the organization of the book. I used the book's order and problem sets for Alg2 without any problem.

Hope that helps!