"I have.......who has...????"

"I have..., who has....?" is a great activity to use for several SOLs in Math 7 and I'm sure many others. Recently I used it for SOL 7.20. Students were each given pairs of cards. One "I have card" and One "Who has?" card. The " I have" cards would have a statement such as " I have 6x +7" and the"who has?" cards would have " Who has seven more than the product of six and a number". The game needs to start with a person reading their "who has?" card and then continues with the second person reading the corresponding "i have". If they are correct, they can then read their "who has?" and so on. You must be sure to make sure each person has one "i have" and one "who has?" and you must be sure they do not match. I've also used sorting activities in this SOL . They are both great ways to break up and create interest in what seems to sometimes be a "boring" lesson...:-).

Review Ideas

Students need everyday reviews to help them retain information. I also like to to do formal reviews as lessons before the big tests in our district. I think we all always need fresh ideas for review practices.
1. Sink or Swim- this game can be used best with vocabulary. Students are on two teams and students who get the question correct can sink an opposing team member or save one of their team members who was sunk. The kids love this game because of the social interaction.
2. Power points (which can be used year after year) are usual because they can be sent home and used over and over for practice.
3. White boards and expo markers for each child keeps them all on task and gives immediate feedback to the teacher.
4. Daily Exit tickets- Students are given a review question each day and have to provide the answer on a ticket to turn in as they exit the class.
5. Swat it- Use fly swatters to select the correct answer for a question
If anyone else has any review ideas, I need some new ones too!

Properties

Last week I taught properties and I found my students severely lacking in prior knowledge. My students were turned off to how easy some of the properties were "Duh, Ms. H, 3 + 5 = 5 + 3.", however they had no idea, even when presented with options, what the property was called. I checked the SOL's and it turns out, they were taught the properties in earlier grades, but not to the extent that their current grade level demands. I found that 3 + 5 = 5 + 3 is taught in primary school, however memorizing that it is called the Commutative Property is not demanded for years after that. I was wondering if there is a certain rationale for that or if Commutative Property is just too big of a phrase for primary school.

SOL 7.20 Activity

This is an activity I just used yesterday in class. Each student gets a set of numbers, variables, and operators (see graphic). I created a power point of verbal expressions and equations. Each screen has two or three depending on the level of difficulty. The students create the algebraic expressions and equations with the cutout pieces. Traveling around the room is an easy way to see which students are having problems and which are doing fine.

Angle Relationships

We just had a fantastic workshop for the third nine week SOLs but we also focused on previous SOLs that were troublesome, angle relationships being one of them. A collegue presented "Can You Build It?," a great activity where students use pipe cleaners to build an angle using a protractor and then add to it its complement or supplement or making it part of a vertical pair. I'm looking forward to using it as a re-teaching tool. I'll let you know how it goes.

What Now!

Now that the first semester assessments and data reports are over, I find myself wondering what to do next. The results were not where I would like them to be (what else is new) yet the scores increased. The trend is to continue with the curriculum and separate the students into remediation groups with a portion of the class period. I am still on the fence about how I feel about this idea. I quess I will know by next year. I just hope the trend does not change by next year so that I will be ready to imporve on the mistakes that I will make this year. My quest is to find the happy medium between knowing when to continue with the curriculum and reviewing previous material.

Angles

Last we focused on complementary, supplementary , vertical angles , etc. The students were having a hard time remembering the word "vertical". I told them that it is the one that is opposite of the angle you are looking for and it always forms a "V", either a wide "v" or a small "v". Also the kids came up with changing the "c" in complementary to a 9 and adding a 0 to remember that complementary is associated with 90 degrees. And for supplementary angles change the s to a 8 and add the 1 and 0 to associate supplementary with 180 degrees.