Tangent, sine, cosine FLASHCARDS

Nothing all that brilliant in this post regarding the actual teaching of sine, cosine, and tangent… BUT, I do have a couple of resources that might be useful. If not brilliant, it was at least extremely effective. =) I took the Prentice Hall California Geometry workbook, cut out and combined the tan, sin, and cos [...]

The Golden Ratio

I’ve never done a lesson on it, though I’ve mentioned in classes before. Now I wish I could have done more!! I started by asking them questions like, What makes a body “proportional”? Why aren’t babies proportional? Why aren’t Barbies proportional? What is the standard of being proportional? What am I comparing with? Why is [...]

Properties of Quads UPDATE

I had previously written the update in the actual post on Properties of Quadrilaterals, but realized the summary sheet needed a bit of explaining. * UPDATE: I’ve added a Properties Summary Sheet to the Box widget that I should have given them after the properties checklist as reference. If I were to re-do this activity, [...]

Properties of Quadrilaterals

FINALLY, a lesson for this section that I’m happy with. I’d say that for the past 7 years I’ve been trying different ways of having students “discover” the properties of the special quadrilaterals (rectangles, rhombuses, squares, trapezoids, etc.), but it seemed like every time I tried they were either terrible at the drawings so that [...]

Vocab Scavenger Hunt

I used to hate introducing new vocabulary words. I still swear by my Verbal Vocab for constantly reviewing vocab words throughout the school year, but oftentimes in Geometry, the lecture on the introduction of over a dozen new vocab words in one class can get so dull, dry, and just boring. Kids mostly tune me out [...]

Research on Motivation

A good Monday morning to all! I saw this falling asleep last night and I had to share as soon as I had the chance. It’s a TED talk by Daniel Pink on motivation. Basically, providing incentives to complete a certain task, like rewards and punishments, actually only get better results if the task is [...]

Movies in Math. Math in Movies.

Here is a website with a compilation of short movie clips on math and physics that you can freely download. http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/mathmovies/index.html I use the Shrek clip as the introduction to inverses and contrapositives in Geometry.(This one was also on YouTube.) The PowerPoint I used is in the Box widget.

Drill, drill, drill!

Finished! I have 27 pages of drills on 1) multiplying, 2) number sense-ing (working in groups of 10), and 3) adding/subtracting integers. They have been combined into 2 PDFs in the Box widget, now moved to the left of the page. These drills are to be used for the Timed Folders and all of them [...]

Really kid? You need fingers for 8+2?

Several years ago at my very first math conference, I accidentally walked in to a session for elementary teachers (before learning that they were categorized by grade levels for you). It was on  Singaporean Math, where I finally understood what “number sense” meant. Out of all the epiphanies and eye-openers that I was absolutely amazed [...]

Perpendicular Lines “… flip it and reverse it…”

This is Missy Elliot. She will help us w/ our lesson today on perpendicular slopes. (If you don’t know this song, no worries, all your kids do. And if you really don’t, it will be SOOOO much cooler if you still sing/ rap the lyrics at the end!!) Give each group/pair 1-3 lines to graph. [...]