Monday, August 11, 2014

First Page of This Year's INB!

Now that there are only two weeks until teachers have to report, I have officially decided that it is time for me to begin panicking and get some stuff started and other stuff finished.  I started to put together my INB for my algebra class.  I only have a very rough start and will share when I get a few more things in it.  Some foldables are still in prototype phase and all the kinks are still being worked out of them! :)

I did however get the first page finished and I am really excited about it.  I originally decided that I would have the first page of the students notebooks be a "Math about Me" page and I went to my trusty friend, Google, to find some images for inspiration.  Most of the ones I had seen were for elementary grades.  Then I came across this one that was posted on "Shut the Door and Teach".

Template available at TPT
I really liked that the students made expressions that went with the numbers that were about them.  I really loved that it connected to our second topic of the year – order of operations!  I am still working the plan out, but I think we can spend some time double checking each others' "Figure Me Out" page as a warm-up or practice activity. 

The example above was for fourth grade, so I needed to put some guidelines in place for my middle school students.  In the directions, I said that they needed to use fractions, parentheses, exponents, square roots, etc. to write their expressions.  The expressions had to be at least 3 terms as well, to stop 9 + 1 being the expression for 10.  I also hope that my example will inspire them to be tricky and challenging.  Here is what I did:

 

I will fill in my self portrait by the time that the kiddos see it.  I also forgot to use a square root somewhere, so I have to fix a sticky note!  The answers are under the sticky notes, so after the students evaluate the expression they can check and see if they are right.  I think it is an easy entry point for students to get back into the groove of math.

Update (8/19/14):  I didn't realize that the author of Shut the Door and Teach had a template available on her TPT store.  Due to copyright, I can't keep the template I formatted to fit in my INB available for free download.   


8 comments:

  1. I appreciate the legwork! Your examples have got me thinking about the possibility of including challenge options where an expression includes both fractions and decimals, or fractions with different denominators, or decimals with different place values, or when the decimal place value does not easily add to a whole number (i.e. 11.25 +0.75 = 12).

    Again thanks for sharing, I'll likely use this during the first week of school.

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    1. The challenge options sound great! I am hoping some of my kiddos will do a few of your ideas on their own, but I'll have to wait and see. Hope that your students enjoy working on it.

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  2. This is awesome! I've seen several different versions of "Math About Me" also, but I really like your set up. Thank you for providing the free download - I plan to use this for all of my classes this year. I can't wait!

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    1. Happy to hear that it is something that you can use! I like the way that it turned out and I am excited to see what my kiddos do with it!

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  3. This looks terrific. Thanks so much for sharing the photos and Word doc. Think I'll use this in September :-)

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    1. I hope that your students enjoy the activity! I'm glad that sharing the format and photos helped!

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  4. I just created this for my middle school students. I created a few different designs so it includes ideas like the year they will graduate from college! I can not wait to see what my students do.
    Great first project for the year!

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    1. Happy to hear that you liked it. Please be sure to read my update and to visit Shut the Door and Teach's TPT store. Links are in the blog post. Thanks!

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