Veteran's Day

     We don't have Veteran's Day off any more. Some people complain about that but not at my school. We have  Veterans come to our school and we honor them. Each department decides how they want to participate and last year almost every department did something. The math department decided to make picture graphs and completely decorate the math and science hallways with them. We had about 700 pictures and it looked awesome! Below is a picture of two of our former students who visited and talked to classes about their experiences. We had at least a dozen Veteran's come and speak to our History/Social Studies classes and Reading/World Language classes. Each of our students met two Veterans during the day. Three of the veterans were from our staff.

Former Students.

     Our day started with an assembly. The whole school said the pledge of allegiance and then 2 students sang the National Anthem. We watched a video on the history of Taps. Then one of our students played Taps for everyone. Our fabulous chorus sang, God Bless America. Then all of our veterans were introduced and gave a short introduction to the students. The students learned more about them throughout the day. We all brought in food and we ate breakfast and lunch and several snacks all day. It was quite a spread! Our celebration started several years ago with just one veteran speaking and each year it just gets better and better. I can't wait for this year!!!     The graphs that the kids made were from Anthony and Linda Iorlano at teachers pay teachers. We did make changes and making some 4 quadrant graphs. I can't post the changes because of copyright. These were definitely worth buying! We had a total of four different pictures but I only have pictures of two of them.

Nice USA graph

This is a graph of the Iwo Jima statue. We had a discussion in class about that battle.
We did not change this one to 4 quadrants.

Not sure which department did these but they turned out nice.

     I would love to see and hear what you do for Veteran's Day at your school. All math ideas are welcome because I need something different or different graphs for our 8th graders to do.

Til next time,

Jan

Squares, Cubes, and Fractional Exponents

     I have decided that this year I am not going to be able to get a full blog post done! It seems like this is one of the busiest, craziest years I have had in a very long time. Everyone I talk to in my district feels the same way so I am not alone, thank goodness. How about all of you? Are you feeling the same stress that I am? Or is it just my district? Just letting you know that the foreseeable future is going to be short posts with a few pictures. At least that way I will still be able to do some reflection and sharing with all of you.
      The other day, I was browsing the teacherspayteachers site, one of my favorites, and I found a great interactive notebook page from RoxyGirl on Fractional Exponents. I like the way she laid out the problems so I bought it and used it with my 8th grade Pre-Algebra class. I really like to have a practice page to go on the left so I created a sheet for the kiddos to do.  I also had them write the answers on the bottom half of the sheet as well. This was a great extension of the lesson but a bit difficult for my lower level students. 

I cannot show the right hand page because of copyright but go to  RoxyGirl at teacherspayteachers to see or buy it. One of my goals in my never ending quest to help my students with their number sense is to show the different forms of numbers. These notes fit into that category perfectly.

Click here to download Square and Cube roots and Fractional

Exponents practice page. 

     I am absolutely loving my Interactive Notebook this year. There are so many pages and topics I have to share and hopefully I can do these short posts until everything calms down a bit.

Til next time,

Jan

Distributive Property - another take on the combo meal idea

     Who doesn't love the combo meal that Sarah at math = love posted a while back to show the distributive property? If you haven't seen this go look at it now. It is fun. There are so many versions of this lesson on blogs and Pinterest and I love them all. Imagine how excited I was when I saw Jessie's worksheet on this at Mrs. Hester's classroom. Perfect! Exactly what I was looking for. The only changes I made to Jessie's sheet was to make an Smartnotebook file. I am fortunate enough to have a SmartBoard in my room and thought it would be fun to make a lesson with pictures of the hamburger, fries and soda so the kids could move the items to display what the meals contained and then write down the expression with the distributive property. Here is a picture of how it looks but the actual file is so much better.

You can have them use the distributive property on this slide or else you could use this for showing how to add like terms.

Add caption

         There are more pages as well as extras to add more combinations of meals. Hope you enjoy using this in your classrooms.

Download a copy of the files here:

You will need Smart Notebook 11 to view this file 

                  Combo meals distributive property SmartBoard notebook file
I've also included a power point for those of you who don't have SmartBoards.
                            Combo meals distributive property power point
       I can't wait to use this next week with my Pre-Algebra 2 classes. Thanks to Sarah and Jessie for your great ideas!

 Til next time,

Jan