Monday, September 2, 2013

Warm-up Calendar

After much inspiration from our #efamath accountability group meeting this week.  I was feeling very down about not having implemented any sort of warm-up for my Algebra students yet this year.  Then came Heather Kohn's Calendar Project post, and I knew I had a solution.  My solution is this week's Made4Math!

Made4Math

Going off of Heather's calendar, I saw a way to easily provide all students with a warm-up problem for each day of class for an entire month!  With our ISNs, I would be able to guarantee that all students would have it everyday, too :)

Since I will be using it for warm-ups, I only included Monday through Fridays.  I also wanted to focus on the difference between solving, simplifying, and evaluating, since I have noticed my students struggled with that in the past.  And since we have also just worked on unit conversions, I figure it would be good to throw some of those in too.  Here is my calendar:

Click image to view the document in Google drive.  Formatting will be funny in drive, but you are able to download original from drive, which should restore formatting.

I did take some questions from Heather's calendar, since we have similar goals, but I changed many of them too.  I also really like her idea of having students create questions.  I might do that toward the end of the month and create my October calendar from those questions.  We'll see how it goes!

-Kathryn

2 comments:

  1. I love this calendar idea that you and Heather have shared! I'd love to know a little bit more about how using a calendar like this actually looks during your class time with students. Would you mind sharing more about your warm-up routine, and how you will use this resource in that routine? Thanks so much!

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    Replies
    1. Cathy thanks for reading! I don't have a very formal beginning of class routine, and I never really established one at the beginning of the year because I wanted to focus more on building relationships with my students. Really my only expectation so far has been that when the bell rings they would be ready for instructions.

      Using this calendar has given me a little be more flexibility with that bell time. I am using interactive student notebooks, so everyone put the calendar into their notebooks. I asked them to work on their problem of the day when the bell rings. Since the answer is the date, I don't go over the problem. It's just something to get them going everyday and it gives them one more chance to practice what they are learning!

      I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions!

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