Girl Math

I learned about Plickers a few years ago from a speaker that was presenting at Meredith College.  He was amazing, and I cannot remember his name (of course).  During his lecture, he mentioned Plickers and I (being the nerd I am) immediately Googled it.  It took me to a video that I watched with my colleagues- and I was hooked!  If you're interested, here is an extensive video that goes into detail of all that is Plickers.   To skip the tutorial, I'll do a run down for you... Plickers are basically "clickers" without the hassle of a tech guy.  Each student takes a card with a code on it and with answers either A, B, C, or D.  You pose your question to the class (either via slides or through the Plicker website) and the students hold up their answer choice while the teacher scans each code across the room.  Boom.  Just like that, you have 37 student responses in under 30 seconds.  Because this is a web-based tool, there is no ne...

On the first day of Calculus - we have homeroom! That means, I only have one hour of class. That's not enough time to get through procedural class info and a typical lesson. So, I started looking around for a fun activity that would introduce future concepts. I came across this blog post ! I was so excited to find the activity and have been using this lesson for about 2 - 3 years. I absolutely love it!!!! You can download as a Word Document from her post. I added the Google version of her activity at the bottom of this post.  After going over some procedural classroom information, I put the kiddos in groups of 3 and handed them the paper. I just observed and walked around - I did NOT assist at all!   First of all - the conversations are amazing! To hear students on the first day of school arguing how to solve a problem - makes me so happy!  Second - this takes the idea of a previously learned concept to help solve the more complicated Calculus concepts...

I may be a little late on this (only about 3 months), but summer rolled around and the last thing I wanted to do was think about grading, curriculum, PD, etc.  Did I mention that we live at the beach? Back to the point: I have a pretty great menu-style final project that I use for AP Statistics.  For a copy of the student document and rubric, use this link .   As you can see from the photo, students were really able to choose not only the topics that interests them, but also the format for submission.  Quite frankly, we use Google Slides often for turning in projects and assignments, so I took that off of the list.  Some ideas for final publications are: Padlet, Prezi, create a game, Canva, and a few more.   Here's the gist...  Appetizer: students choose a topic that interests them  Soup or Salad: they must gather data from an appropriate source via a method discussed in class  Entree: once the data has been collected, stud...

Desmos is such an awesome tool in the math classroom. This is a perfect lesson for students to show off their creativity while demonstrating their understanding of conics.  In this project, students watch a YouTube tutorial on restrictions. Then students are given the freedom to draw whatever they want.  Desmos makes it so easy to keep all student's projects in one place. We can quickly grade their submissions following the rubric given to the students right in Desmos.  We each have one section of PC, so we like to have a competition for the best drawing. Since you can easily "anonymize" the submissions in Desmos, students can judge fairly. I have my students vote on the best drawing in her class, and her class votes on the best in mine. This gives the students a little incentive to impress their peers.  Not everyone has the best artistic ability, but students enjoy the challenge. One thing that you have to watch out for is cheating. Students can google imag...

For this activity, students are completing stations around the room- all dealing with parametric functions.  Each problem they complete will eliminate a who, with what, and where answer so they can solve this Clue-like game! If you're at all like me, when parametric functions were introduced into the Pre-Calculus curriculum, I was like "whut?"  At no point in my educational career (and trust me, I was in school longer than the average bear) did I remember ever learning this topic.  Thankfully, Google was there to guide me.  Over the years, I've become more comfortable teaching parametric functions and because of this, I've been able to grow my activity repertoire.  If you want to make a copy of the activity document, click here .  Included are the stations, answer choices to be eliminated, and a work space for students. The first sheet of the document just has all of the problems in one location... for those worksheet type of folks. I print out the st...

Another successful GooseChase scavenger hunt! It's the end of the year, and the students need some fun. Since our school purchased the GooseChase subscription, I try to use the app as much as possible.  Before the scavenger hunt begins, I have the students work on problems in the classroom. They check their answers with me before they leave the room. The groups take a small whiteboard to write the answers to go with their missions.  I created about 35 missions so that there are no ties.  The only problem - trying to come up with different missions each time.  My kids really enjoy getting out of the classroom. I also enjoy watching the submissions as they come in! The videos are the best!  Here is the math portion: Sine & Cosine Graphs/Applications  Here are some of the missions that I sent my students out to do: Missions   Of course - not all of these will work with your school, but at least it gives some ideas.  ~RJ

I love teaching circle trig; however, it's the end of the semester, and I'm running out of time. There are so many activities that I would love to do, but oh well. Maybe I can find time next year! Haha! Teacher jokes! :)  I wanted to spend a lot of time with sine and cosine applications. I think that it's important that students get a ton of practice. We have been spending about 2 days so far on these types of problems.  Typically with madlibs, you create the paragraph by choosing parts of speech before you even know the story. In this math activity, students must complete the multiple choice questions with answers that correspond to a word. Once they find the correct answer, they place the word in the correct blank.  In the end, students have a story that doesn't make any sense at all. However, this assignment allows me to assess student knowledge quickly, and I can address any needs right away!  I typically try to give practice where students walk arou...