Middle School Math Moments (now Cognitive Cardio Math)

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 way to fi

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