Post date: Jan 7, 2017 9:10:53 PM
Math 7H Period 1
SOLs Covered: 8.3b Consumer Applications
Math Unit: #13 Consumer Math
Daily Agenda: January 2-6, 2017
CCPS Student Digital Resource: Consumer Applications
Upcoming Assessments: Consumer Applications Quiz (Mon. 1/9)
MSM2 Period 3 & 4
SOLs Covered: 7.4 & 8.3a Practical Problems Involving Proportional Reasoning
Math Unit: #13 Ratios, Rates, & Proportions
Daily Agenda: January 2-6, 2017
CCPS Student Digital Resource: Practical Problems Involving Proportional Reasoning
Upcoming Assessments: Ratios, Rates, & Proportions Quiz (Mon. 1/9)
After School Help Session: Tues. 1/10, 3-4PM
Happy New Year, everyone! We're certainly off to an interesting (though incredibly cold!) start. It's a bit chilly even inside today, so I'm going to keep this quick so I can get back to my hot tea and my Netflix marathon in my bundle of blankets.
The honors class started the week with a little reading in a Scholastic digital magazine, Money Confident Kids, to jump start our unit on consumer applications. While we covered the basic setup for solving different types of consumer math problems (tax, discount, percent of change, simple interest, etc.), a good bit of focus was placed on word problems and how slight tweaks in wording can add extra steps to the problem.
The MSM2 classes had to wrap up some work from the days leading up to winter break, but once that was done we jumped into proportional reasoning. Again, emphasis was placed on word problems throughout the week. Proportions as a concept is simple enough and the kids have no trouble solving a proportion for a missing component. The difficulty lies on setting up the proportions from word problems and throughout my years of teaching I've found kids can easily make minor mistakes that result in completely wrong answers.
Thankfully for both classes (honors and MSM2), we found a bit of hope to make breaking down word problems a bit easier. On Thursday, all math students throughout the school finally took the ARDT pre-test. This is something normally done early in the school year, but with testing transitioning to the Chromebooks there were quite a few technical difficulties encountered, thus pushing it back several times. While the data gained from the test will not be quite as useful this time, it allowed us all to get an idea of what SOL testing will be like in the spring since it all runs on the same system. On top of that, I was ecstatic to find that the program itself has been updated. Though this means the kids will need a bit more practice with the tools in order to become comfortable with the system itself, but my joy came from finding that these tools now include two different color highlighters as well as two different color writing tools that also come in two different sizes. This might seem like a bizarre thing to be so happy about, but it allows me to bring back some of the color coding strategies I used to teach before rules for SOL testing took them away. Previously only one color highlighter and one color writing tool were permitted and while we found ways to make this work, it was never quite as helpful as the color coding strategies. We'll have to limit ourselves to just the two of each for now unless I hear the rules have been changed to allow for more, but it's already a huge help for the kids to be able to highlight one ratio in one color and a second ratio in another in order to ensure the numbers are all put into the correct place in a proportion.
Well, that's more than I set out to write (isn't it always?) and my toes are getting a little to icy, so I'm going to close things out here. Students have been reminded that the extra credit closes at the end of the day on Monday no matter what, so please encourage them to take advantage of this last chance this weekend. The daily agendas have been updated for at least the next week, but I'm thinking adjustments will have to be made based on all that snow I'm seeing outside my windows. For now, the kids can plan on quizzing for the last units covered on whichever day we return. I hope everyone stays warm and if you have to go out, stay safe!