Middle School Math Moments (now Cognitive Cardio Math)

I have been noticing Interactive Student Notebooks quite a bit online recently, as I have been spending more time on Pinterest and hopping from blog to blog. Many of the items I see as part of the ISNs are the same type of items I've made with my students for years. I used to have students keep a notebook with notes, examples, etc. However, a few years ago, our district did not have math books. At that time, most (if not all) of the other 6th grade math teachers were using math packets that had the notes/examples more formatted for the students. I had not used packets before, but with the lack of a book as a resource, I decided to use them.....and they are ok. I have found myself more "tied" to using the packet that I like....it makes me feel like I am going through a workbook of sorts, and though it provides structure, I feel that it makes things more boring than they used to be. Whether it was my implementation of the packet use or just the packets themselves, I don...

This is an "and more" post! I teach math for 4 periods of the day, but I also teach language arts, so I want to share thoughts about the "quickwrites" that we have started doing this week (instead of writing about math:). I do have my students write quite often - they write nearly every day. Normally, they write about a topic from their idea list, but occasionally I give them an idea to write about. This week, in addition to their regular writing, we did "quickwrites" on Tuesday and today. For the quickwrite, students read a poem or passage, and then respond in writing for about 5 minutes. The response can simply be whatever the poem/passage made them think of, and where their thoughts went from that initial thought. Or, they can take one line from the poem and focus just on that line and what thoughts came from it. I am so impressed with their writing during these two writing sessions! Both Tuesday and today, students read poems from the book 100 Quic...

Equivalent Trios is a great game! We have been working with fractions, decimals, and percents, and we have worked on various activities during the past few days. One of the activities was this Equivalent Trios game. Each triangle has a percent, decimal, fraction, or picture on each side. Each side  needs to be matched with another trio that has an equivalent percent, decimal, fraction, or picture. I worked with each group to get them started with this game, because they did need some guidance to get on the right track.  The directions are written for this to be played as a game: the group places one tile in the middle, and each student begins with several tiles, taking turns to find a match. If they can't find one, they pick up an extra tile and the next person takes their turn. However, I found it more productive and time-saving (we were using this as a center activity and so did not have a lot of time) if they worked on it as a group to find the matches. Each student did...

This post has been moved to:  http://www.cognitivecardiowithmsmm.com/blog/fraction-decimal-percent-fold-it-up  

This post has been moved to cognitivecardiowithmsmm.com

This post has been moved to cognitivecardiowithmsmm.com .