Last Few Weeks of School

The last two weeks are hard.  Its difficult to engage students in any new topics, but you can only spend so much time with new material that will be forgotten over the summer weeks.  There is only so much old material that can be reviewed before a final exam.  Here are a few stolen things from the MTBoS that I used during the last week of school that were worthwhile.

Pattern Project

I used Sara's idea for a pattern project for my 9-10th grade Algebra 1 class.  They spent about 5 class periods on the project.  This was a great review of linear and non-linear concepts. Most of my students were proud of their final projects.  Some were only worried about their grade.  Most did not read the rubric before handing in the project.  How do you get 9th graders to read the rubric!?

Estimation180 finale

Thanks to Jonathon, for blogging about your estimation finale!  I used this activity with several different classes and it went beautifully.  I had a class that I only had for 30 minutes before an early dismissal last week.  I could not have come up with a better way to keep students engage/enthusiastic about learning on those last few days of school.  These are the days when students don't even bring a pen or pencil to class, and if they do they intend to use it to sign year books. I used days 151-165, and then again with days 175-190.  Everyone can estimate so this activity is low risk.  I especially liked giving an award to the most incorrect answers. Those students were adamant about their non-participation and they the most were excited to received a prize for "bad" estimating.

Anything from Dan Meyer and Desmos

I did an introduction to graphing quadratics with Desmos. I stole some of Dan Meyer's slides from his Algebra 1 curriculum to explore quadratic equations with my Algebra 1 classes.  Some students chose to graph these equations by hand, while others chose to create graphs and tables using Desmos graphing calculator. After a year of using Desmos with my Algebra students, I was surprised that they any of them chose to graph on paper, but many did chose to graph by hand.

Penny Circle.  This activity is just so cool.  I do not spend enough time in Algebra 1 with non-linear functions, and as a result students are surprised that a linear model does not work here.  The concept of using a model to predict future or much larger inputs was difficult for many students, and only a few understood why a quadratic function makes sense here.  Many students guessed too low for their original estimates, so they were very hesitant to go along with a model when they were prompted by the program as to whether or not they should stay within the bounds of their original estimates.  To which I would offer, "do you think you chose the wrong model or do you think that your original estimate was too far off?"  Students were quick to abandon their original estimates, but sometimes the model was incorrect.  Regardless of these challenges, the activity is valuable for varying levels of understanding.   The idea of fitting a curve to "real data" is so intuitive with this activity.

Final Exam

I used standards based grading (SBG) with all my algebra classes.  This was the second year I gave this final exam, and I made only a few tweaks from last year.  I created an excel spreadsheet to track student grades by concept and compare them individually and by class.  Students who showed proficiency on the exam, but did not show proficiency on concept quizzes during the year were able to increase their quarter grades for those concepts.  SBG is a truly empowering way to monitor student growth.  Students were also not intimidated by the final exam because it looks exactly like all their quizzes, but it has about 25 concepts, rather that the usual 4-6 per quiz. 

Because students were taking many state designated tests throughout the year, our school district decided last year that students were no longer required to take a final exam.  I decided to give them an exam anyway.  I don't tell them this, but I am not going to fail a student based on the results of this exam.  I give them the exam because they enjoy seeing what they know and what they don't.  Because for the most part they if they have mastered systems of equations, they know how to solve the systems problem on the exam.  It is empowering to leave Algebra 1 knowing what they know (and what they don't).

They were allowed to use their ISN (interactive student notebook) on their final exam.  I will write another post on the usefulness of this notebook later.  This was my first year using the ISN and I will never go back to a standard notebook!  I feel like its an accomplishment if students are able to create a resource that they will use.  (And they begged to use this for the final!)  I smiled when I saw students using their table of contents to find topics that we had worked on weeks or months prior.  They were able to solve these problems with ease by just flipping to the right page. 

Finally, reviewing for this exam was a breeze.  I handed students a list of topics that were covered during the course.  These topics matched the ones listed on all of their quizzes.  I asked students to use the topic list to cover the answers to previously worked out questions, and re-do the problems on lined paper.  Students who took this review seriously, asked good questions.  Many of them understood the questions better than they did the first time.