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.