Monthly Archives: April 2013

Geometry – Google Forms To Pre-Assess

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Screen Shot 2013-04-22 at 8.26.20 AMIt’s time for Geometry in 6th grade once again.  I love this time of year because Geometry is so much fun!  Each year, I have my student create Geometry Booklets.  They are half sized booklets that we make from folding a small stack of 8.5″x11″ copy paper in half.  The booklets are a quick way to review past topics without spending days reteaching the topics or taking notes.  Each Geometry lesson I teach goes into the booklet and then they make a wonderful Cubism cover in Art Class.  Taking notes in the booklets are a change from their usual math notebooks.  Change is good in the last weeks of the year to keep the student’s interest up during “Spring fever”.

Every year I jump into the Geometry books, but this year, I wanted to know what they remembered from 5th grade (as I have students from multiple elementary schools) before I started teaching.  After their last test I gave them a Google Survey asking them if they knew certain geometry definitions.  I had them answer yes if they were certain that they knew the definition, and no if they did not know if (or even if they weren’t sure).  The form looked like this.

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Screen Shot 2013-04-22 at 8.36.49 AMGoogle forms will display the results in pretty pie charts like this.  However, I prefer spreadsheet summaries, so I tallied up my own results.  I counted the results with a CountIf in Google Forms and then conditionally formatted with color to show me at a glance what I really needed to focus on.  The results looked like this.  The red 20 means that 20 of my 32 students did not know the formula for the circumference of a circle.  The green 0 for parallelogram means that all of my students know what a parallelogram is.

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I was surprised that so many students did not remember the area formulas (I had similar results for the areas of triangles and rectangles).  I thought many more students would have remembered the area formulas from 5th grade.  This shows me I will not only need to focus on the area formulas, but more frequently reinforce if I want my students to really learn and then remember these formulas.  Area is such an important topic throughout all “areas” of mathematics.  🙂

MS Sunday Funday – What Would You Like To Blog About?

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What are you interested in blogging (or learning) about?  Please fill out the form below to help generate ideas for future Sunday Funday blog posts!  I would love to include High School in addition to Middle School bloggers.  There are many topic overlaps so this is a great idea  (thanks Reilly)!

I’ve had some new ideas lately.  One of the things I would like to explore is posting our creative lessons around a topic or even a software program.  For instance, one week we could post lessons where we used Desmos , Geogebra, or another favorite software.  One week we could all post how we teach solving one-step equations (or any other topic).  We could post about success we have had using lessons currently available on the internet, like from Dan Meyer’s 3-acts or Mathalicious.

We could also take on challenges, like creating our own 3-acts or creating a new lesson where we used Desmos.  We could all create a Virtual Filing Cabinet like Sam’s on our own blogs one week.

Following in the Global Math Format, the first Sunday of each month could be where we post a list of our most recent “Favorites”, whether it be new things we have tried and loved in our classroom or even a collection of blog posts we have enjoyed reading the past month.

I feel that as a “team” we could create some amazing resources.  If you like any of these ideas or have new ones, fill out the form and/or throw them in the comments section.  Happy Sunday!

Julie

Teaching Your Students How to Study for a Math Assessment

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#msSunFun

Click here to submit your MS Sunday Funday post!

So, we are back from spring break – at least in body if not in spirit!  April is the most difficult time of year for me to blog.  It is not that I don’t have great ideas or don’t want to blog.  It is that my mind is STILL on spring break.  After a week of vacation, having to go back to work full time is a shock to my system.  At the end of each day I’m exhausted.  I don’t even want to open my computer up when I come home – and I usually don’t.  I even missed Desmos presentation at Global Math last Tuesday night.  I’m a huge Desmo’s fan so this was a tragedy for me.  I didn’t realize that it was Tuesday night until 9:45 and by then it was too late.  Thankfully, it’s recorded (you can watch the Desmo’s presentation on Global Math here), but it’s not the same for me!  Part of the Global Math magic is interacting with the other attendees and especially the presenter.

If you have a post for this week – please add it.  Right now, there is just the two of us.  🙂  And, in spring break style, I am extending this post for another week.  It’s such an important topic and I’d love to hear as many ideas as possible!  Thanks as ALWAYS to Mary for being our most consistent Sunday Funday blogger!