Another Foldable

I am starting to feel very good about how well my kiddos are understanding now that I have been using foldables.  I see them being used and referred to much more than their notes ever where.  It takes some thinking to put together a foldable for the lessons, but I have been doing it so far and I am pleased with the results, so it is keeping me motivated to continue with them.

I am also pleased with the data that I am getting back from the practice problems I am making them do before they start their homework.  I am thinking about mixing it up next year and putting some of the questions onto index cards and having them do a "scoot" activity in their table pods.  I have to think a little bit more about it, but I like the concept of it.  I just want to do things that are more active than filling out a worksheet.  It is my goal for this summer to find more ways to do that.

Here is another foldable that I did with my students.  I focused on making them tell me what they thought the process was after seeing the examples.  That is why the inside of the foldable is incomplete.  I just gave myself enough to get the ball rolling with the kiddos.  What I learned from this is that I haven't stepped back enough this year to listen to them and their thinking.  They weren't sure what to say and afraid of saying the wrong thing.  Talking in partners and small groups helped to open them up.  I will be working more of this in next year where I consciously make myself stop and listen.  I just learned a lot from this lesson and have found an area to improve and that is good.  It is a new direction to push myself and hopefully become a better teacher for whatever is left this year and definitely next year.

On the front of the foldable, we wrote reminders of perfect squares, prime numbers, powers of 10, and some patterns for variables.  We also wrote the answer to what a radical expression was and the product property of square roots off to the side.

The inside had 3 examples and then the steps to take to for each strategy to simplify radicals.  As I said in the post, part of the steps are missing because I only wrote enough to get the ball rolling with the students.