KHS Math Dept. News
Week of January 11, 2016
Good Morning!
Hope you all had a restful weekend. I'm sure I don't need to remind you that next Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so we get the day off! Last week I got the opportunity to start working one-on-one with 6 AMAZING teachers who volunteered to work with me on a coaching cycle on whatever they wanted help with. So it was pretty much the most fun week ever because everyone that I worked with is already really good at their job, they just wanted a little polishing, so they were very open to my feedback. So a big THANK YOU to everyone that is working on becoming the best teacher you can possibly be!
Important Dates Coming Up...
January:
Jan 19-21- Hobbs out for Instructional Rounds Training
Jan 22- Ms. ONeil's Birthday!
Jan 24- Mrs. Archer's Birthday!Jan 25- Staff Meeting after school @ 3:00
Jan 31- Mr. Tomlinson's Birthday!
February:
Jan 8- TEA Site Visit
**Please let me know if I have missed your birthday!!
Word Walls
I am a GIANT fan of word walls. When used correctly, they can be incredibly helpful for kids learning the language of mathematics (also, it's a campus expectation, so there's that!). My word walls were always student-created on a half sheet of chart paper with the word, definition, and a picture created within the word to help students remember the visual (ex: for "quadratic" students would make the "u" into a parabola on a graph to help them remember what it meant, in addition to the definition). I left them up all year, covering them up for CBAs or EOCs. Click on the link for more high school math word wall ideas: http://scaffoldedmath.blogspot.com/2015/09/high-school-math-word-wall-ideas.html
Math Four Square
One thing I always stressed to my students, especially in Algebra 1 and Algebra 2, is the four different representations that a problem has: verbal (written in words), numerical (equation, function, etc.), graphical (on a graph, obviously), and tabular (table). I saw the visual below the other day and liked that it gave another idea of how to get students to show their thinking in different ways. Does it have the exact same "four representations" I was thinking of? No. But it got students to think through the problem, check it, and then explain their answers. What is most important to me is that students need to be able to approach a problem (no matter what the original question is asking for), choose a method to solve, and have a way to check. Writing to explain their work is an added bonus!