Being brave doesn’t mean you go looking for trouble.
-Mufasa; The Lion King
We’re finishing our 16th week of school just as we all get ready for a holiday break. This week was full of school spirit; it was the last week of the first session of winter sports, school musical try-outs and spirit week! Here are some pictures from our spirit week. There are A LOT of them as they include pictures from game day/party on Friday December 22nd.
Pre-Algebra worked on solving angle equations and constructions. Everyone is reasonably comfortable using a protractor, ruler and compass so that’s a good place to be. It will be 2 years before the kids need to use these things again in a math class (Geometry) so I’m hopeful that they just have a nice base to go back to. They will see the vocabulary and have the opportunity to work more with angles and geometric shapes in our grade 8 curriculum.
Math 7 is continuing to work with expressions. We’ll be moving to multi-step equation solving along with word problems in the new year. The common core material for this unit is presented in a very challenging way, so this portion of the unit is something I plan to break up into sections. Instead of mashing all the different types of word problems together the way the Common Core does, I’m going to divide them into separate days with a day for each style of problem. Even with that, expect the kids with lower reading skills to feel that this is challenging. The Pre-Algebra kids kicked off the year with this module and found it to be a tough unit.
In Math Lab we’ve been splitting our period into two parts. Our first part is self-checking Khan Academy work with expressions. The kids are all at different places with this, but the self checking makes it very nice for them to have instant feedback on how things are going. Our 2nd half of class is either whiteboard work, a card game to work on our integer skills or something else where we are interacting as a group.
Lastly, we started a peer tutoring math crew in grade 7. We have 7 tutors signed up so far and they are matched with 8 kids. Each pair has been asked to work together at least once a week for about a half hour. The kids tutoring are really excited and after just one session I’ve seen a tremendous difference in both the kids being tutored and the kids tutoring. The opportunity to work with a peer who is not necessarily a friend in addition to a teacher is a great thing. They meet in our classroom so they have my help if they need it. If your child is interested in joining in as a tutor or would like to be paired with a tutor, this will be an ongoing program that I hope grows as the year goes on.
Have a wonderful holiday break! See you again in 2018.
Amy
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