My Other Math Sites

Between 2 Numbers • Chewable Math • Visual Patterns

 

Lessons From the Classroom

Fawn Nguyen Fawn Nguyen

Number Talks for Middle Schoolers

If I may recommend only one thing to K-12 classrooms, that thing has to be number talks. As a warm-up routine, it usually takes less than 10 minutes, yet it pays dividends in building number sense, connecting computational strategies, honoring flexible thinking.

I finally finished this set of 90 number talks for middle schoolers — enough for a full school year if you do this routine every other day. But I hope you’ll also share it with your elementary and high school teachers to inspire them to create their own or modify these.

I’ve already shared my notes about the routine on the first 4 slides. I just want to add that each slide — or each group of 3 slides — is intentional, meaning there are several strategies that I hope your students and you will explore and share. My goal is also to tweet these out, one at a time, and include people’s responses on a slide following it.

You know what you should do on the other 90 days. :)

Read More
Read Read

Pacing Guide

For someone who has openly admitted to not following curriculum pacing guides, I sure spent a ridiculous amount of time churning one out. Our middle school is adopting CPM Core Connections 1, 2, and 3. Aside from our own reviews, the decision to go with CPM were also based on:

  1. Desmos is embedded in many lessons

  2. Other teachers' reviews, including Riley Lark's

I don't know if this would be of any use to you, but I might as well share the doc math 8 pacing 2014-2015. It's kinda pretty.

I replicate our school calendar and put in all the holidays and half-days. I go to each chapter in CPM and write down the guiding questions. Matching up the standards to each chapter was a pain in the ass. (CPM does it the other way around: they have the standards in one column and the different lessons that cover those standards in another.) The suggested number of days for each chapter does not include assessments, so I add about 6 days on top of whatever CPM recommended. I'm going to post the pacing guide near my desk — probably the only document I will print in full color this school year.

(Oh, I took out Chapter 1 because it's on problem solving. C'mon, I got this.)

Then I'm going supplement it like crazy. I can't teach straight from the textbook. Just can't. So the 6 days that I add to each chapter will hopefully allow us some wiggle room to do other stuff.

Other stuff includes, but not limited to, what you see on the right sidebar of my blog.

We also need time to begin each class period with math talks because it was one of the most powerful things we did last year. (Grrrrr. Just realized that most of the images on the math talks site are not there. Why now.)

I was brainstorming with a couple of 6th grade math teachers at another district, and we were listing out a possible warm-up/math talk schedule, something like:

My assignment this year looks almost like last year's: 2 sections of Math 6, 1 section of Math 8, and 1 section of Geometry [1].

I wish you a healthy school year. Teach what you love and love the kids. Follow the rules, but break a few if doing so makes it better for the kids. 

[1] I'm happy to say that we will no longer be tracking kids in math. However, we need to finish out what we'd started with these 8th graders who took Algebra last year as 7th graders. So this group will do some geometry, some stats, and a whole lot of problem solving.

Read More