Week 3 Reflections

I felt disappointed this past week.  It's not my students - they are awesome.  It's not our work together exactly.  I think it is that I am not in my groove yet.  I'm still making adjustments for how much we can get done in class.  I miss opportunities for reflection.  And I know I rush students at times.  It will get better!

We had errors this past week to discuss.  The errors were in solving absolute value equations.  Too many students were confused about how to isolate the bars, how to set up two equations, how to check their work.  I'm thinking back over that lesson and how I can improve the work we did.  Students and I have been discussing the need to show their thinking so that we can discover areas needing correction.

The best highlight this week was our review day on Friday.  Students loved the Desmos Polygraph game.  Students said, This is cool!  They also like the Kahoot game.  One student asked if we could review for every test like class that day.

Students created short Tellagami videos on review problems.  It was rushed but fun!

We learned this week how to take notes with our iPad by snapping pictures of our work and uploading the pictures to Google Drive.  We also learned how to create the short videos.  I also learned a little about iMovie that I will get to share with students soon.

I've begun planning our first lessons on systems.  Our curriculum has been adjusted this year; there is more emphasis on solving 3-variable systems, solving using Gaussian elimination, solving with matrices.  We will spend less time developing the three ways to solve 2-variable systems - in fact we will simply review those three methods in one class. There is a heavy emphasis on solving within context.

We take our first unit test this week.  I feel like the test is as much for me as it is for my students!