Week 8 10/20 - 10/ 24

Time seems to fly by. Having an EOCT this semester, I have been really looking at new and creative ways to get the students involved in preparing for this test. In the past, I have had pre, mid and post tests for them to determine their individual areas of weakness which I still do, but I have not had them do anything creative or new with that knowledge other than have a notebook of topics that they could pull from to do extra practice. I have really struggled to come up with a way to do that. I decided to have them help me. We brainstormed a list of ways that they could review for the EOCT and for ways that we could work on their own individual weaknesses. They decided that they wanted to make games to review for the test. Each pair of students chose a category and is responsible for that review game. Coming up with ideas for the areas of weakness was harder. One idea consisted of researching the topic on the internet and summarizing their findings to share with the class. Another student suggested having the students that were good in one area write a short story about the topic to explain it to others and make a notebook of everyones contribution. For areas where all the students were weak, we kind of did an attribute listing where we listed the attributes of the items that we were good at and then tried to link those with the ones that were weaker to find relationships between the topics that we could use to help us learn those better. This will be an ongoing process for the rest of the semester with this group so we will work on these strategies continuously.

In the trig classes, we are using a lot of hands-on activities to get them involved with the trig functions and their graphs. The projects that they turned in at the end of last semester are really amazing. I am working on what to do this semester that would be similar to what they have done.