Starting the Quadratics Unit After Break
I'm a couple days away from Winter Break! I'm really looking forward to having time off and to have time to plan cool lessons that I can take my time to think about and not have the pressure of planning 2 one-hour lessons every day. I'm going to teach a quadratics unit when we get back in Integrated Math 2, which I'm excited about. I'm not a huge fan of how the book introduces it (I find it really cheesy-- you have to make a brochure for parabola customers... huh?)
I'm thinking of starting off with a strategy I got from my best friend/roommate, who's actually a government teacher. The idea is you give your students a table with a box for letters A-B, C-D, etc. Then you give them a topic and have them think of any words related to that topic. I'm thinking of giving my students the prompt "words to describe a graph" and hoping they think of words like increasing, decreasing, domain, etc.
Then, I want to play a game of "graph scattegories" that I saw on mathequalslove.blogspot.com in a super old entry while I was browsing awesome math teacher blogs yesterday. I'm going to show them the graph of y=x^2-2x-15 and have them write as many one-sentence facts as they can about the graph in 4 minutes. Then team 1 reads their list and crosses off any sentence that was also said by the next team or is deemed incorrect by other teams. Then team 2 reads what hasn't been crossed off their list, and so on. Additionally, I'll try to add some individual accountability by having the list be passed to the next student on the team each time, so that way it's not just one kid on the team doing all the work.
I'm thinking that after that I'll go over my graphing vocab powerpoint with fill in the blank notes to go with it, and then have them replay the game and see how they have improved.
To cap off the lesson, they'll all grab an individual whiteboard and marker and we'll go outside. I'll have them line up while I tape a graph of a parabola on their back. Asking only yes-or-no questions to other students who can see their graph, they have to sketch their graph on the whiteboard. Essentially, it's polygraph.
I told my other best friend/roommate (a math teacher) about it, and she thought it was a good idea except that every team would write exactly the same thing during scattegories and have to cross off all their list. I didn't think so, and we played it ourselves. I scored 7 and she scored 3, so I think it is possible for teams to score nonzero scores. Plus, it'll really give teams the drive to learn more vocabulary words about graphs and want to use them in an authentic way. I'm planning on seeing how it goes, but possibly using this strategy (with different graphs) a couple times a week for the whole unit and see how students' academic language proficiency changes over time. Perhaps I could even save a couple teams' work as work samples and then chart their growth over the unit. I'm usually a little too lazy to really teach academic vocabulary in lessons that are specifically geared towards it, and it ends up not getting emphasized enough, but I really want my IM2 kiddos to have the ability to discuss with fluency and accuracy a graph.
Here's my game sheet
I'm thinking of starting off with a strategy I got from my best friend/roommate, who's actually a government teacher. The idea is you give your students a table with a box for letters A-B, C-D, etc. Then you give them a topic and have them think of any words related to that topic. I'm thinking of giving my students the prompt "words to describe a graph" and hoping they think of words like increasing, decreasing, domain, etc.
Then, I want to play a game of "graph scattegories" that I saw on mathequalslove.blogspot.com in a super old entry while I was browsing awesome math teacher blogs yesterday. I'm going to show them the graph of y=x^2-2x-15 and have them write as many one-sentence facts as they can about the graph in 4 minutes. Then team 1 reads their list and crosses off any sentence that was also said by the next team or is deemed incorrect by other teams. Then team 2 reads what hasn't been crossed off their list, and so on. Additionally, I'll try to add some individual accountability by having the list be passed to the next student on the team each time, so that way it's not just one kid on the team doing all the work.
I'm thinking that after that I'll go over my graphing vocab powerpoint with fill in the blank notes to go with it, and then have them replay the game and see how they have improved.
To cap off the lesson, they'll all grab an individual whiteboard and marker and we'll go outside. I'll have them line up while I tape a graph of a parabola on their back. Asking only yes-or-no questions to other students who can see their graph, they have to sketch their graph on the whiteboard. Essentially, it's polygraph.
I told my other best friend/roommate (a math teacher) about it, and she thought it was a good idea except that every team would write exactly the same thing during scattegories and have to cross off all their list. I didn't think so, and we played it ourselves. I scored 7 and she scored 3, so I think it is possible for teams to score nonzero scores. Plus, it'll really give teams the drive to learn more vocabulary words about graphs and want to use them in an authentic way. I'm planning on seeing how it goes, but possibly using this strategy (with different graphs) a couple times a week for the whole unit and see how students' academic language proficiency changes over time. Perhaps I could even save a couple teams' work as work samples and then chart their growth over the unit. I'm usually a little too lazy to really teach academic vocabulary in lessons that are specifically geared towards it, and it ends up not getting emphasized enough, but I really want my IM2 kiddos to have the ability to discuss with fluency and accuracy a graph.
Here's my game sheet
Welcome to blogging! I remember seeing that scattergories idea, thinking it was neat, then never trying it myself. I'm curious to hear how it goes for you. I wrote down my own list before looking at yours to compare; I got 5 unique and 5 duplicate. Interestingly, all my duplicates were written by your math roommate too!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what to think about equivalent answers... You split up facts a couple times, saying "there is a y-intercept" and then "the y-intercept is ___". I feel like those shouldn't count twice. But then I *did* like you splitting up the x-intercepts. I think it's because you described them as points. I wrote "roots at 5 and -3", and I don't think I would want to accept those as two separate facts, but saying "there is an x-intercept at (5, 0)" seems totally reasonable as an individual fact. And then there's some plain notation differences: do the answers "range: [-16, infty)" and "range: -16<=x<infty" count as being the same? Kids will fight... But then, maybe that's a good thing, fighting over math!
I found it humorous that what you're looking forward to in your break is having time to think through upcoming lessons. I'm totally the same way, except I don't usually end up taking that time! However it happens, enjoy your winter break :)
Wow, thanks for the thoughtful reply! My roommate actually made me cross off "has a y-intercept" as bullshit, haha!
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