Looking Back...and Forward

As the year comes to a close, I am trying to look back at all the good things that happened in class.  It was actually hard to think all the way back to August 2012, but I think I've come up with the most successful things for the year.
1)  Weekly Reviews!  This year our secondary math department decided to consistently give our students a Weekly Review each week.  The purpose of these reviews were to keep students current and fresh on concepts.  They were great in Algebra I for topics that we don't cover, especially the geometry concepts.
2)  Nspire Activities!  I worked hard this year trying to expand my knowledge of the TI Nspire calculator and integrating activities from the TI website.  I attended a T3 conference in January and we made a lot of progress!
3)  Accepting Failure!  The joke this year was that I wanted my students to get a problems wrong.  I wanted my students to learn how to be wrong and then grow from it.  I told them repeatedly that we almost learn more from them getting a problem wrong because then we can sit back and analyze the problem and figure out the mistake.  Also, it was important for me that students learned to take risks and not be afraid to participate in class.  We celebrating failure!
4)  Sentences!  This year we had our students write sentences for their solutions to all word problems.  The sentence couldn't being with a pronoun or number.  This was awesome and really helped the students with reasonableness.
5)  Project Empathy!  This was not a classroom activity, but our community service project.  We collected 60 Thanksgiving meals including the turkeys and made the news!  Check out our website www.saintsofempathy.com.

And so now that brings me to looking forward.  As of now, three things I would like to try next year.
1)  Command Center!  At the beginning of the year, you give your students classroom policies and then they forget about them.  Thanks to my wonderful colleague, Luci, I plan on putting up a Command Center bulletin board that will remind the students daily of classroom policies.
2)  Mama's Rules for Living!  After cleaning out a cabinet at home, I found a book called "Mama's Rules for Living" by Mamie McCullough.  This is a book full of quotes that my mom gave me back when.  I plan on putting up a quote a day for the students to ponder on.  Just because it's math doesn't mean we can't write and develop a relationship with our students.
3)  Fantasy Football!  My colleague had her students participate in Fantasy Baseball this Spring and I am pumped to maybe do Fantasy Football.  We found a great resource that has all the instructions, worksheets, and ideas needed to get it started.  We'll see....

Amazing Race

Today we tried something fun and exciting for our students...an Amazing Race!  The students spent the entire day racing around campus to different "pitstops".  Each of the teachers came up with a 20 minute challenge for the students to complete and earn stamps.  I loved our math challenges!  The first was to fly a kite and determine the height of the kite using the Pythagorean Theorem.  To do this, the students had to measure the string that was let out and the distance from the person holding the kite to the person standing underneath the kite.  This proved to be difficult because of the windy day, but we provided a "detour" where the students could still complete the task.

Our second challenge was for students to calculate their rate using d=rt.  They were to run the bases of the baseball field, skipping second base.  We only gave them the distance between home and 3rd base and home and 1st base.  They again had to use the Pythagorean Theorem to find the distance between 1st and 2nd and then calculate the total distance run.  The last task was to find their group's average rate.

The students really did a great job and it was nice spending a day outside taking in the sun!  Here are a few pics, with more to come!

My awesome colleague Monica who got us the cool shirts "Weapons of Math Instruction"!

My advisory team "Cute as Pi"!