SOLs Covered: SOL 8.14 & 8.18 Solving & Graphing Multi-Step Inequalities
Math Unit: 12 Inequalities
Daily Agenda: January 3-6, 2023
Upcoming Assessments: Quiz 2.03 Inequalities (A-Tues. 1/10; B-Wed. 1/11); Unit 3 Test (A-Thurs. 1/12; B-Fri. 1/13)
Happy New Year! I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday season and that your new year is off to an amazing start! Before we get into this week's math happenings, I want to remind everyone that the term will end at the end of this month (well, technically Feb. 2) so the kids have four weeks to either work on improving their grades or keeping them where they are if they're currently happy with their academic standing for my class. While I contacted the parents and guardians for those students who were failing or at risk of failing before the break, we still have a few more grades, including a quiz and test, that will go in before the term ends, so it's important that kids stay on top of their work. To help with their efforts, I've just finished setting up the previously promised IXL extra credit opportunity. This will be applied to the test category (or the quiz category of the test scores are already sufficient) and it's not an "all or nothing" kind of thing. The kids can earn up to 10 points for their correctly answered problems, so even if they don't "ace" the assignment, every point earned will help improve their overall grade. Since this assignment is also reviewing the algebra topics we've covered this term, it will also serve as review for next week's assessments, so please help me by encouraging the kids to get started on it this weekend.
This week had us continuing our algebra work and as briefly mentioned before the break, we've moved onto solving and graphing inequalities. This shouldn't be an entirely new concept for the kids as they would have started working on them in 6th grade with basic one-step problems, moving onto two-step inequalities last year in 7th grade. While we "up" the difficulty in 8th grade with multi-step inequalities, it's also further complicated by negative coefficients, which as the kids discovered require us to flip the inequality symbol at the end. We've done a lot of practice with this, but kids tend to still struggle a bit, often either confusing when we flip or wanting to flip it all the time. I covered how to check their work in a similar manner to how we checked our equations work, but we added a "second check" that also will catch their mistake when they do make a mistake with flipping the inequality symbol. We continued that practice today with the A-day students by going through parts of their graded formative check together, with me showing them some additional tricks or "hacks" using the Desmos calculator along with some test-taking strategies that help eliminate wrong answers. The B-day kids will get this on Monday and I'll give both groups of students a few pointers/reminders the day of the quiz before we start to give them a push in the right direction.
Well, that should cover everything for this week and I'm trying to stick with my new year's resolution of not staying too late and keeping a good work/life balance in place, so I'm going to wrap things up here. As always, please feel free to email if you have any questions. Hope you all have an amazing weekend!