Monday, April 25, 2016

I can tell it's April

Wow. April kinda sucks. My smart, motivated delightful class is taking their joking to new heights. Play fighting, 'stepping up' to adults in a joking way, and almost-racist comments are becoming hard to control. I'm about as done as I can be and it's only Monday.

Friday, February 19, 2016

Graphing Skills

I consistently find that students struggle with scale when graphing. They often can't quite wrap their heads around a graph that has a scale other then 1 to 1, or when the x and y axis have vastly different scales. Also, when setting up scales, students will not make the space between their labels consistent. For example, if labeling the y-axis by 10s, the student may skip one square on the graph paper, and label it five, but then skip two squares for each 10 after that.

I felt frustrated that I didn't have a resource that asked students to practice JUST making scale, so I've developed my own series of activities for them to practice that. This is designed to be used with gradual release. Do the first couple activities on the doc cam as an entire class, then have the students work with a partner on the next few.

Finally have the students work individually to set up graphs from the final page. They don't have to graph the points/lines, since the learning objective is to create a workable, accurate scale for both the x- and y-axis  based on the data given, but of course if students need or want to practice the graphing, they can do that too.

Here's the worksheets I made to practice this: Graphing: Practicing Scale