SOLs Covered: SOL 8.15 & 8.16 Relations & Functions with Slope & Intercepts
Math Unit: 13 Relations & Functions
Daily Agenda: January 17-20, 2023
Upcoming Assessments: Take-Home Quiz 3.01 Relations & Functions (A-Fri. 1/27; B-Mon. 1/30; first grade of Q3); Winter VA SGA (B-Wed. 2/1; A-Thurs. 2/2); Q2 Benchmark Test (A-Tues. 2/7; B-Wed. 2/8)
Howdy! I hope everyone had an amazing week! Before getting into this week's math happenings, I wanted to again request that folks check grades on Tyler as we are quickly approaching the end of the term. I sent letters home yesterday and today for any student who is currently failing or at risk of failing, but there's still time to change that! This is a reminder that all formative checks can be redone, all quizzes come with a second attempt, quizzes and tests can be corrected to earn back half credit, and missing Edmentum (RB Q2 Week ##) can be made up with additional time. Additionally, there is an extra credit opportunity available on IXL that is being added to the test category; as that category has the biggest impact on the overall score, this can be a huge help! The term officially ends on Thursday, February 2nd so I have thus set my deadline for all work to be turned in as Wednesday, February 1st to all for time to grade everything and ensure that grades are entered accurately. Please help me by encouraging the kids to take advantage of these many opportunities. As I've said before, I'm available for additional help on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings; I do just want to remind folks that it doesn't start until 7AM, so if students need to be here before that, they might have to wait outside until then to even be let into the building and if let in before 7AM, they'll need to wait in the cafeteria as I need a little time at the start of the day to ensure that everything is ready for each class.
Now onto this week's new math topic. We started working with relations and functions, which also goes into a little extra detail on linear functions, including slope and y-intercept. When we started the unit Tuesday/Wednesday, I introduced it as potentially one of the easiest topics of the year. While it's another algebra topic, which can be intimidating on its own and can at first look even scarier when you find that we're now dealing with two variables instead of just one like we did with equations and inequalities, it's essentially a big substitution topic, plugging in different values of x to find y. After a little practice with that, the kids agreed that that part was indeed super easy. That being said, there are tricks to it like there are with any topic we cover. The biggest struggle for most students for this topic is the fact that it's a very heavy vocabulary unit. If you do all the solving correctly and have a perfect function table, you'll still get the question wrong if asked for the domain but you list all the y-values (domain = x-values, range = y-values). For this reason, my Word Wall board has gotten a little crazy looking as it's overflowing and I might sound a little crazy with how often I'm repeating myself, but this is all in efforts to drive home the vocabulary. To further aid with this, I've encouraged the kids to make themselves flash cards to practice with; they can be physical cards (they could even print smaller versions of the word wall cards I put up in the room from the VDOE website, just print 4 to a sheet) or digital cards (such as a simple Google slideshow, Quizlet, or some of the other sites I have bookmarked on my class Portaportal).
We'll be continuing this unit throughout next week before doing the quiz, starting at the end of the week. This quiz as you've hopefully noticed from the top section of this update will be a take-home quiz. This is in part due to the fact that we'll be immediately following up with two major tests, the first being the state's winter Student Growth Assessment (SGA) followed soon after by the second benchmark test, which is a county common assessment. With so much testing, I didn't want to lose another day that could have been used teaching and reviewing. If the take-home quiz goes well, I'm thinking of potentially making future quizzes also take-home quizzes to give back additional teaching/review time down the road. Right now we have enough time in the calendar to cover all the materials and to have 2-3 weeks of SOL review prior to testing, but with snow still potentially having an impact at some point and other factors that could cut into learning time (drills, absences, other testing days, etc.), I'm hoping I can add some more teaching/reviewing time into the calendar. For this next quiz, as attendance can often fluctuate, I always have any new grades for the final week of a term added to the next term, so the quiz for this new unit will be the first grade for third quarter.
Well, that should cover everything and I've got a niece I don't want to disappoint who's expecting me to take her out for a celebratory dinner (there was apparently some kind of "bake-off" in her culinary arts class that she's hoping she won... if not, the dinner will be her consolation prize), so I'm going to wrap things up here. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Have a great weekend!