Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Geometry A - Unit 1

Review for our unit 1 test tomorrow. The kiddos did pretty good taking their first quiz with their notebooks. I've gotten a few negative comments... "This is stupid" "I hate this" etc. I am also struggling to keep the classroom picked up. My students are REFUSING to help out. Very frustrating. I'm trying to stay positive and stick with it. I think these notebooks will really help them learn how to learn. 

Anyway, here's the beginning of the geometry a notebook.











Saturday, August 24, 2013

Hi, I'm new here.

I'm new to this. Blogging, not teaching. I've been teaching for 6 years. I wanted to begin blogging because I have shamelessly stolen the good teaching ideas of others, and I want to give back. I have some GREAT ideas, and I want to share them with you people. So LISTEN UP!

My newest good idea is notebooks. I don't do a true interactive notebook, even though that's what I'm calling it. I rarely have my students "invent" their own things. Mostly because I am that big of a control freak. Maybe I'll get better about that (doubtful). I use the notebooks to teach students how to take good notes and USE their notes to study. We have completed 5 pages so far in Geometry A and 4 pages in Algebra B. Both classes have set up their table of contents, index, pocket, and grading rubrics. I use a document camera to model each day's entries. I'm looking into getting a new document camera... any suggestions? Mine is getting older, and software updates are killing me!

That's enough for now... Pictures! Here are the first few pages of our notebooks. Table of contents and pocket, policies and procedures, and grading rubrics. We also created an "index" in the back, but I didn't photograph that.






This is the beginning of Algebra B. The first concepts we cover are Arithmetic Sequences (first time teaching THAT!) and Slope.