I want to do my part to support your efforts in finding ways to send interactive math activities to your students from afar. So I have been building a library of Google math activities, which are all updates to existing printable math activities.
In this post I show what the updated partner scavenger hunts look like on Google Slides and solve 'n check! math tasks look like on Google Forms. I also link to my store's new GOOGLE math section.
It's hard to believe we're all here, being forced into homeschooling or developing algebra lessons that can be taught from home. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it all and wondering how I ever took normal life for granted.
But here we are! Homeschooling our kids (or in my case "homeschooling" since mine is in K and kindergarten teachers are magicians and I have no idea how they do what they do) or creating digital lessons on platforms we may have never used before.
So between virtual trips to the zoo and online art lessons for my own little one, I'll be adding to my digital math library. I already have a YouTube station, math cheat sheets and dome digital templates, so I will link them here:
While you're stuck at home with your own teenagers because of COVID-19 social distancing, or have been given the monumental task of teaching your math students remotely, what better way to engage than with a little math+art? Desmos has extended the deadline of their Global Math Art Contest to April 30, 2020 so that more students can participate as part of their distance learning.
TL;DR:
◾ Use the free Desmos calculator to recreate an image from public domain.
◾ Submit it here: Google form
◾ New to Desmos and all its features? There is a Resources section below.
◾ You can also check out Joe McCormack's desbot to see how equations come together to make an image:
Log functions are kind of cool in that they force us to think backwards. Logarithms are inverses of exponentials (which I covered in this exponential functions video) so when we create our parent table we're thinking y first, then x. This can get a little confusing, so I wanted to make a video to go along with the free logs cheat sheet I posted a while ago on my blog (and that I re-linked here).
I'm slowly going through all of the free math cheat sheets on my blog and making videos, which I hope will be helpful if you are ever not able to teach students face-to-face. My hope is that these videos will work for flipped classrooms, on remote learning days or even as an extra support.
In this post is a video and a free graphing log functions cheat sheet. The cheat sheet can be given to students for their notebooks or enlarged to create an anchor chart (link to directions on how to do this easily is below).
For 5 years I taught algebra 2 in a self-contained and an inclusion setting. Especially in my own classroom, I needed to reteach a lot of algebra topics. For 7 years before this position I taught algebra and algebra 2 in Boston where a lot of my students needed some convincing that math was super cool. So this post is a collection of resources and ideas that have worked in my classrooms to reach students who need extra support for one reason or another.
I love algebra, so when I hear kids say they don't like it, it breaks my heart. Algebra is that thread that connects so many maths, from what kids are learning in elementary school all the way through college calculus. It was my calculus professor in graduate school who first clued me in on the Freshman Dream. "What is that?" I asked during one of our tutoring sessions. He volunteered in the school's tutoring center once a week. He pointed to where I had simplified an (x+y)2 expression to x2+y2 in the denominator of a fraction. Here I was in calculus B committing a quintessential algebra error.
If you have students who are struggling in algebra or who just plain don't like it, I've been in your shoes. Most of my 13 years of teaching math were spent convincing kids to love math, that math is great, that algebra is the best, that math takes you places, so I get it! And I know the ideas in this post work.
In this post are 7 tried and true teaching ideas to spark a love of math in disengaged algebra students:
It's possible that my favorite functions to graph are exponential functions. They look super intimidating at first with their parenthesis and exponents in the air, but by taking them step-by-step, first creating a parent table then shifting this table to find coordinates to graph, they come together before you know it.
Graphing exponentials is one of my favorite things to teach. I say this about most of the topics we cover in the course, but I see so much growth in students during our exponentials unit that it's hard not to love it. At first, students aren't even sure where to start. By the end of the week, they're graphing like champs.
In this post is a video and a free graphing exponential functions cheat sheet. The cheat sheet can be given to students for their notebooks or enlarged to create an anchor chart (link to directions on how to do this easily is below).
What's the deal with those extraneous solutions we get when solving radical equations? Why do we get two answers but sometimes have to throw out one or even both? In this post I share a video explaining through graphs the answers we get when solving radical equations.
