August 20, 2012

Made For Math: Calendar and Classroom

I went into school a couple times this week to work with another teacher on Geometry, Pre-Calculus and general plans.  We've hashed out our binder system and have a plan for Standards Based Grading.  Next up is getting into the specifics, like what to teach in a couple weeks when the kids start showing up!

While there, I set up a few things in my room:

Last week's Made For Math featured an awesome system by Ms. Mac for making up work.  I immediately decided to steal her calendar, but I wanted mine to be bigger and reusable.


Spare small dry erase board turned 2 week calendar!  I can block off the days I'm busy and students can sign up for other days.  I'll also ask them to say what they're working on so I can make re-assessments ahead of time (glory of last block prep).  Since the sign up list will get erased every week I made it one of my goals to keep track (via google doc) of everyone who attends and skips after school help.

I also set up my class agendas.  They only take up 1.5 boards (now that I'm hiding the homework and journal until the end of class so no one skips ahead) so I have lots of board space left for kids to work at.

My desks won't stay in rows, but they haven't finished the floors yet...
And I started hanging stuff on my bulletin boards.  Posters you've seen before.  The Math Practices section will get colored in, cut better and filled with examples of each practice as the year goes on.  I liked the dark background so I didn't do anything fancy with borders or backgrounds.

Click to embiggen
Click to zoomify


And finally, we raided the math closet while no one else was around.  Check out what I found!



5 comments:

  1. Your room looks great! But you may need to explain the "TrigTracker"... I've never seen one!

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    1. It was totally new to me to. I hypothesize that it works by hanging on the wall, raising the long arm to the correct angle and letting the short arm hang vertically. I guess that long arm is so long so you can talk about reference angles? However, I just realized that it might serve the double function of being a double pendulum, which do such a nice job of modeling chaos. Exciting discovery!

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    2. Arg, don't you just hate the rejected comment / start-over process? Anyway...

      That trig tracker is totally neat. I love finding stuff like this. Do you see how to find tangent of the reference angle marked by the long arm?

      Joe

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  2. I've got to say that trig tracker is totally awesome. I made the same thing on sketchpad and it also traces the graphs out, but having a physical model in your hands is pretty awesome.

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  3. OK, I'm late to the party, but I LOVE LOVE LOVE the whiteboard calendar for reassessment sign-ups!

    We are a simple people.

    - Elizabeth (@cheesemonkeysf)

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