Here are previous Friday Mashups, a compliation of various things from my classroom:
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An activity I really liked:
Starting the year off, I really wanted to find more, and more fun, practice activities for our first Algebra 2 unit: graphing “special” linear functions (piecewise functions, absolute value, and step functions). I felt as though my students hadn’t gotten enough practice in the past. When I found this activity (free!) from Moray Math Mania on tpt, I was hesitant because it sounded so chaotic: paper footballs flying around the room? I decided to try it though, because it also sounded fun. And it was totally worthwhile!
I used the Google Slides version of the activity (linked in the activity’s description), and let my students choose their own difficulty levels. They graphed the function on a whiteboard, checked it with me, and then got to shoot a paper football through their “field goal”. Some of them were atrocious at it. It was hilarious, and so so fun. They started trying to figure out which graphs would make the largest goal to shoot at, which led to them thinking more critically about the functions!
I put up a google spreadsheet with all their names on it on the board, and I would add their points for graphing and their bonus point for scoring as I checked their graphs. I would not let students self report this…make sure you’re checking their graphs AND their football shot! I emphasized that the points were just for fun and the main goal was to practice – some students chose to not do the football part, or did not even want me to track their points, which was totally fine. My students found that propping their dry erase board on their chromebook screen made it easiest to shoot the paper football! Also, many of them had never played with a paper football before so I let them do a practice shot and gave a brief tutorial on how to hold and shoot them.
My 8th period class (end of the day) were UPSET when the bell rang and even more upset when I said we wouldn’t be continuing the activity the next day!
Tech integration:
I discovered Mentimeter at our district’s tech boot camp week this summer (it’s an optional PD week where teachers present to other teachers about tech tools they’ve discovered) and it is really fitting into my plans for quick feedback! On Tuesdays, our opener activity is to quickly check in with how we’re doing in class. So I walk around and tell each student what graded items they are missing (this works because my biggest class is 16), and while I do that they rate themselves on each of our learning targets for the unit using Mentimeter. To participate, you just have to go to menti.com on whatever device you’d like and enter a 6 digit code that’s displayed at the top of the mentimeter (I cut it off in my screenshot because I don’t want you all rating yourselves on my pre-calc learning targets!)
In the image, my pre-calc class had only covered the first 3 targets in class, so if they gave themselves a score on the remaining ones, it meant they thought they knew something about it from a previous class. It’s meant mainly for self-reflection, so they can decide if there’s an area where they maybe need extra help, but I can also glance at the scores and see if there’s any target we might really, really need to go over again as a class.
You can also make word clouds, multiple choice voting, and other cool interactive data displays using Mentimeter! And it’s FREE! (there are priced plans that let you get more features, but I haven’t found them necessary yet)
#onegoodthing:
My pre-calc students are making me feel like an awesome teacher. I had all of them last year in Algebra 2, and a lot of the beginning parts of pre-calc are like “here’s what we did last year, now add a little bit of new notation or new vocabulary”. They have remembered every single one of the things we did last year. They basically taught themselves the review lesson on domain, range, increasing and decreasing intervals. They’re great.
Mastalio. Math. Mavericks. 