Day 4

As a reminder, my Algebra class meets four days a week (MTWF), so day four is going to be a Friday but it will be two days after our day three meeting on Wednesday. Today is really the first day that is my "own" in Algebra. The first semester of Algebra at my school is basically all about linear equations, and I start by taking a look at proportional thinking - more specifically, ratios and proportions.

My opener today is designed to build off the skills review/assessment they just had and help front-load some ideas for today's lesson. At the moment (assume that phrase for all planning posts on this blog), this is what it looks like:

As a reminder, students are expected to begin the opener by the time the bell rings. They then work on it for a little while individually, then discuss with their group members, then students come up to the smart board and explain them to the class (with that getting saved to PDF and posted to the class blog).

We then open the lesson with a bit of vocabulary.

Then I try to lead them into solving proportions by starting with something they hopefully can do somewhat intuitively: "When you divide some number N by 2 you get 12. What's the value of N?"

From that we move slowly toward doing the inverse operation, to "undo" dividing by 2 we would multiply by 2; to undo dividing by 4 we would multiply by 4.

But then what happens when we throw a fraction into the mix? Hopefully they'll see that the same principle applies. From there they work through several examples with the variable in the numerator, then we try to extend to having the variable in the denominator.

At this point I really want them to focus on inverse operations, so I'm not showing them to "cross-multiply" to solve proportions.

Assuming things are going reasonably well at this point, I then introduce a hopefully somewhat interesting application of proportions.

In my head we still have about 10-15 minutes left in class (but often my head is very, very wrong), so we'll try to make a quick geometry connection. (If we don't have the time, we'll skip this - perhaps taking a look at it the next day.)

How ever much we get through gets posted to the class blog as a PDF.

We will then talk briefly about how I expect them to work through (and take notes on) the videos, as their homework will be to watch/work through the Solving Proportions and Percents video.





While I'll probably tweak it, this is what I wrote last year on the blog to follow-up what we talked about in class.

We previewed the Solving Proportions and Percents video that you're going to watch for homework tonight and talked about the different pieces in it, how you should use it, and what you need to write down in your notebook. There are three main parts to the video: an Examples and Explanation part, a Guided Practice part, and a Self-Check part.

Examples and Explanation: Just what it sounds like. I explain how to do the problems and work through some examples. You don't need to write anything down (unless you want to), just watch, listen and learn. Pause the video and replay parts if you need to.

Guided Practice: I give you a problem, then ask you a series of questions with about 5 second pauses between questions for you to think about it and answer it for yourself. If you need to, pause the video to give yourself more time. Again, you don't have to write anything down here (although you can and it may be a good idea to).

Self-Check: I give you a problem, ask you to write it down in your notebook and solve it, then I show you the solution in the video. Once the problem is on the screen you need to pause the video, write it down and solve it, then play the video again to check your work. You may need to pause the video again to view the solution if you need more time. These problems you definitely need to write down in your notebook.

Remember, you can always replay any part of the video you need to go back over something.

I would love to hear your thoughts/feedback/suggestions for improvement on any/all of this.