Week 4: 9/22 - 9/26

I am trying to incorporate as much creativity as possible. I am finding it more difficult as our semester comes to an end when I am pushed to finish the material for county "benchmark" exams and for final exams. We have 9 week semesters rather than 18 so it often gets difficult to incorporate lessons or projects toward the end of the semester.
An update on what my classes have been working on. The trig classes are working on their projects. Several are still having a difficult time really getting into their creative presentation of their material. I do have some doing skits, short stories, and even a music video. We hope to pull it all together electronically as kind of a yearbook for the last 400 years of mathematics. The projects are due next week, so I hope to have some ideas on how to tweak the project next time to make it more creative. In the concepts classes, they struggled so hard to not repeat rules or explanations that I may have used. We had explanations dealing with football and gaining and losing yards. We had holes and mounds of sand on the beach representing positive and negative numbers. I had a student use her checkbook and printed out deposit slips and withdrawal forms to illustrate adding and subtracting. I was really impressed with how some of the students really got into making sure their "friend" understood how to add and subtract integers and what it really means.

I have several ideas planned for next mini-semester which starts Oct. 13th. Next week won't leave much room for new activities or projects with exams, but we will pick back up on the week after.