Middle School Math Moments (now Cognitive Cardio Math)

Chapter 1: The Nonnegotiables of Effective Differentiation I'm very excited to get started with this book; it's a great topic! So far, it's interesting and a pretty quick read. This is summary of the important ideas in the chapter....sometimes I get a little detailed, because I don't want to miss anything! In Chapter 1, the authors reinforce the idea that differentiated instruction is not new. (This was discussed in the intro ). Though students are in classrooms with others of the same age, students are not "the same." In spite of this, and because of all the material there is to cover, many teachers teach their students as if they are the same. According to research, students will engage more with learning and will learn more robustly when the learning is designed with students' differences (and similarities) in mind. A learner-centered model views the teacher's role as one that is responsible for covering material, but also one that is ...

It's summer-time and time to get some reading done! Myself and my Tools for Teaching Teens collaborators are going to read and review Differentiation and the Brain, How Neuroscience Supports the Learner-Friendly Classroom , by David A. Sousa and Carol Ann Tomlinson.We will each be reviewing different chapters, and those blog posts will be linked together as we go. If you're interested in learning more about this book, check back and follow the links to the different chapters:) I'm going to give a quick review of the book introduction here, and then later today I'll be reviewing Chapter 1. According to the authors, differentiation is brain-friendly and brain-compatible! They describe the rise, fall, and rise of differentiation, starting with the one-room schoolhouses, where teachers taught all subjects to all students, of all ages, and HAD to differentiate - there was no other way! As the country's population grew, public schools grew, and students were separat...

We are getting close to our last week of school, and I have been trying some different activities with my math classes. Last week, we spent 3 days creating rectangular prisms, to help solve the following problem (this problem is very similar to a problem from a computerized benchmark test...a problem that VERY few students were able to figure out. That problem used a triangular prism; I switched it to a rectangular prism): Some groups created tiles, others drew them. "An artist created a rectangular prism covered in square mirror tiles to hang from the ceiling in her studio. The prism's length was 10 inches, the width was 8 inches, and the height was 4 inches. Find the surface area of the rectangular prism. Find how many tiles will be needed to cover the entire prism. If the tiles cost $0.35 each, how much did it cost her to cover the entire rectangular prism?" To solve this, I had the students actually create the prism and somehow show a...

This post has been moved to:  http://www.cognitivecardiowithmsmm.com/blog/discovering-slope

  I am so excited to be part of the Sailing into Summer Blog Hop! I hope you will "hop" through all the blogs and read the wonderful ideas that everyone has to share! My "fast four" are: 1) One classroom thing I want to do again next year: I did a much better job of using my "Ticket out the Door" poster this year, and I want to be sure to continue that practice next year (and improve it even more). Click to see on Pinterest 2) One classroom thing I want to change next year: I need to super-organize my materials into binders, as I found on Pinterest ( Ms. DeCarbo at Sugar and Spice ). I do have my materials in binders already, but I have larger binders that separate materials more by the type of activity than by topic. So I want to reorganize by topic....it could take me a while! Click to see on Pinterest 3) One gift idea for instructional assistants: I have been thinking about this one a lot lately, because my instructional assista...

I can't believe it's May already! Time is moving so quickly (as usual), and we are down to about one month left of school! Our state testing wrapped up and we have started working with function tables and graphing function equations, on a pretty basic level.  We used some practice from our textbook, and the students created functions for each other to graph, but I was feeling that it just wasn't enough practice. I couldn't find anything to suit my needs "exactly," so I decided to make a shorter Footloose activity to give the students some extra practice (along with the movement that Footloose provides). Click to download for free:) I created 15 cards that give the directions and the functions. The cards all have the same directions, but they have different functions to graph. The answer grid for this activity is actually 2 pages - one for students to choose x-values and find ordered pairs using a table and a second one for them to graph the functions...

Click to go to post I'm so excited  - I was given the opportunity to guest post on Rachel Lynette's blog, Minds in Bloom . The post went up on her blog today, if you'd like to check it out:) Many thanks to Rachel!