(Great acronyms in the title.)
I just got home from a fantastic four day visit with my sister in New York City. I live in a much smaller city myself, so I wasn’t sure what I would think of NYC, but I loved it! I loved all of the beautiful people, the amazing and delicious varieties of food, and the daily hustle and bustle. It was so much fun hanging out my sister and seeing where she lives and works. It was also my first time in the Big Apple, so of course I did all of the fun tourist stuff.
Central Park
Brooklyn Bridge
Statue of Lib
My sister and I also went to the Museum of Math, which I highly recommend. All of their displays are very interactive and let you experience and discover the math. They’re also super fun! We spent almost four hours there! Going with my sister was perfect because she has a great natural curiosity for math even though she went the finance and accounting route. She can solve all those fit-these-shapes-into-this-box and disconnect-this-metal-loop-from-this-other-metal-thing puzzles that I never have the mind for.
Of course the Math Museum has pi door handles.
Overall, it was an awesome trip, but it’s so nice to be back home in spacious, natural, beautiful Wisconsin. #tmc14 took place over the same weekend, so while I was spending 24 hours each way on the train to and from NYC, I got to catch up via Twitter on all the excitement and mathematics happening in Oklahoma. Hoping to attend #tmc15 next summer!
So now that I’m home, I’m thinking about what sort of procedures I want in place this year in my classroom. I definitely want to do something with interactive notebooks (INBs), a popular topic in the MTBoS these days.
There are people with far more experience than me (which is zero) who write about INBs, so definitely check out Math=Love, Kalamity Kat, and Infinite Sums for great ideas and advice.
My reasoning for INBs is to help my students process information, organize their work, and have a resource that they can refer back to. Even when I student taught an Advanced Math 2 (like a Pre-Calculus Honors, maybe?) class where the kids furiously took notes on their own, I still think they needed help with organization and actually getting something useful out of their notes.
I’m planning on implementing a very low-maintenance version of INBs. Foldables are definitely NOT my thing and there’s no way I could keep track of a table of contents, let alone make my students do it. So really these are just going to be regular old notebooks. NBs, if you will.
Basically, my plan is to have my students put all the math they do into their notebooks. That’s… it. Maybe this is too unstructured (I’ll find out), but I really don’t care what the format is or how pretty it looks, I just want them to record the math they do in an organized manner and all in one place.
I’m going to require that they write the date and the topic on the top of each page. Below that they do the warm up. Below that they show the work for whatever activity or investigation we do. Below that we sum up the investigation or do notes or additional examples. Below that goes homework or some other sort of output. That’s the plan. I’ve requested some glue sticks so that the students can paste in any handouts. Yay, glue sticks.
It sounds simple. Hopefully it is. I plan to do regular notebook checks so that they know I’m serious about them picking up their pencils and doing the work. Accountability for them, accountability for me. Can you tell I’m a first year teacher? I’m constantly worried that they’re not going to take me seriously. Well, I guess I just better be serious when I need to be serious, right?
Along with the notebook, I’m requiring a folder for graded work or extraneous handouts. Hopefully I won’t be handing out much that won’t go in the notebook, but they need a place to store quizlets (my department’s name for our formative assessment), instruction sheets for projects, practice tests, etc.
Eh. I’m at the point where I have all these PLANS but have no idea how they’re actually going to work until the school year starts. The anticipation is killing me!
Mary Likes Math 