Monday, July 15, 2013

One Month... Time to get Serious!


School is just ONE.MONTH.AWAY!!! It seems like I just got out of school yesterday! Of course, technically with all my travel/workshops, I have been "in school" for most of the summer. Last week, I was in Albany, NY attending a Forensic Science workshop and wowzers, that's going to be an AWESOME course!!! However, we won't teach it until spring semester, so I stiffled my excitement to start working on some other items.

Target Time!!!
Oh man, oh man, the BEST part of summer is scouring the Dollar Spot at Target! As soon as I got home, Target was on my must-go-to-right-away list! And I'm so glad I did... check out the awesomeness that is The Dollar Spot!


Now this is a very small selection of the goodies I picked up because the next day, I decided to visit a few more local stores looking for pocket charts. (For those of you wondering why I want pocket charts in high school, make sure to check out this post from "i is a number".)

Now back to the goodies above. See the mini composition book in the middle? Well, it's really a sticky note pad that looks like this:


Let's pretend for a moment that you are an algebra teacher... (oh wait, I *am* an algebra teacher!) Can you imagine how awesome it would be to help a kid work a problem AND graph it without swapping papers multiple times?? Oh, and best part, they also had a dry erase version of the same thing for use under a document camera! WIN!! :)

Shopping Time is over... on to the Creating

Honestly, when I work up this morning, I had *no* idea what to do for my #Made4Math project. So after giving my kitty her medicine and feeding her, I came up to my office to start working on my to-do list. Throughout the course of the day, I got a few projects done, so I thought I'd share them! (Fair warning... these are only going to be useful to AP Stat teachers... sorry for anyone that is looking for general items of mathy-ness!

Formative Assessment
If you've followed me at all this summer, you know that one of my goals is to increase student engagement and the use of formative assessment tools in my classroom. After reading Embedded Formative Assessment, I knew that one thing I really wanted to do was add in more multiple choice questions to my lessons. In particular, I wanted to use more released AP questions and AP-inspired questions to gauge student understanding. So one of the first things I did this morning was to print off all of the released Multiple Choice questions and read through them to classify them by chapter in my text book. Then I created this handy "cheat sheet" to help me stay organized...


If you teach out of BVD 3/e and want a copy, send me an email or leave a comment and I'll forward it to you. (Disclaimer: I do not promise that this document is typo-free!)

Also, isn't the font just ADORABLE? After a Twitter discussion yesterday on fonts, I totally started crushing on this font and couldn't wait to use it in a project! (thanks @kathrynfreed for the link!). I also made a binder cover using it... totally my new favorite!

AP Stat Live Binder
Also today, I was looking through my notebook from last year and decided I needed a better way to organize the articles that I like to use in AP Stat. Sometimes these are articles I print off for students to read, sometimes it's a news clip that I use in class, etc. I had been wanting to try Live Binders for a while, so here was my chance!


This was really easy to make and I can see great uses for LiveBinders! Over on the left, I organized by the units in my curriculum, then did subtabs for each article under the unit. YAY for organization!! :)

So what did YOU make this week?
Head on over to the #Made4Math blog and check out the other submissions!

11 comments:

Jessi Haag said...

what is your name on Pinterest?

druin said...

@Jessica -
http://pinterest.com/druinok

Bowman said...

HI! I have a stat teacher friend who might be interested in some of this. could you send me that doc with the multiple choice questions? bowman.g.dickson@gmail.com

Also, are you sharing that livebinder?
Thanks!

Unknown said...

Hi....I saw on Pinterest the trigonometry unit circle you made on paper plate with dot stickers and paper reference triangles....but I couldn't access the direction sheet....could you please email that to me?? Thanks for all your great ideas!!! mamiecourtney@hotmail.com

druin said...

@Mamie, I don't teach trig, so that wasn't me. However, I bet you are thinking of Amy Gruen's blog post here: http://squarerootofnegativeoneteachmath.blogspot.com/2013/04/unit-circle-philosophy_18.html

Hope that helps!

Unknown said...

Yay! I made one of your posts :) Your organization ideas are always genius and useful even though I don't teach stats!

Anonymous said...

Yes!! I teach AP Statistics out of BVD! I would love a copy of your work. I just stubbled on to you site. You have many useful tools and ideas. Thank you, your work is very much appreciated. Here is my email address purcell.uga@gmail.com .

Thank you.

Karen

Unknown said...

All I can say is WOW! I love your ideas. I teach AP Statistics and would love a copy of the Multiple Choice organizer. My email is beasleyt@salineschools.org. Thank you so much. I will continue to follow your blog posts!

Unknown said...

Hi! I currently teach AP Stats. Could you please send me that document with the multiple choice questions by chapter. THANK YOU! RWilliams629@gmail.com

Hannah Schuchhardt said...

I teach out of BVD 3/e and would love if you could share your multiple choice questions with me! My email is hykwon@cps.edu

Thank you!

MathEdJax said...

I'll be teaching AP Stats this fall out of the BVD book and would love the resource mentioned above. My email is jstone@rich227.org