1st Full Week Completed

Hello! Congratulations to everyone for completing the first week of school. I know many of us have had some difficulties, but I do feel like I might be starting to get the hang of this new teaching thing. Not to say that I don't have a long way to go, but I am starting to feel a bit more comfortable.

4 Days...

Hey guys, after 4 days of teaching, I feel like an adult again. Whoever said that teaching is any easy job and that anyone can do it, didn't have 2 brain cells to rub together.;-) I love being in front of the class room. It's the only place that I can speak in front of a crowd without getting red. The best part is when you do a lesson, hoping and praying that some of the students will take an interest, and you look up...it's completely quiet and everyone's working. It doesn't happen often (yet), but when it does, it makes my day! Anyone have a moment like that?

Just Checking In

I just wanted to let people know that I am on the blog.

New School Year, New Blog

Welcome to Adams City and Welcome Back to another school year at Adams City. By building a strong community within our math department, we can all grow and the students can find sucess. Let's use this post as a test for you all to comment on and practice with the blog.
What's your favorite part about being a math teacher? My favorite part is that I get to make corny math jokes ALL day long and students just shake their heads! It's even better when a student makes a math joke!

CCTM- A Framework for a Balanced Math Program

presented by Carla Haas, and Julie Schmatz, Mesa County Valley Schools District #51
Mostly based on Five Easy Steps to a Balanced Math Program by Larry Ainsworth and Jan Christinson
The concept was intended to not be a new Math Program, but a framework to teach the existing curriculum and bring in components to help students be more successful at Math. I have a big packet if anyone wants copies of a presentation and some excepts from the book.
The five steps are

• Computational Skills (math review and mental math)
• Problem Solving
• Conceptual Understanding
• Mastery of Math Facts
• Common Formative Assessments

The main takeaways

• A portion of each class should be set aside for reviewing math concepts and skills that they had already learned and refine their number sense. Their structure seemed very similar to our Math'sMates, only Math'sMates has done all of the work of writing the problems and structuring it for us.
• The mental math is asking them a series of questions with integer or rounded numbers which sharpens their arithmetic skills
• Problem-solving as defined by NCTM Principles and Standards involves "Engaging in a task for which the solution method is not know in advance...and should be encouraged to reflect on their thinking" This seems to be more about strategizing and reflecting rather than the computations to get there. I think we all hope that the computations are the easy part of the problem solving for our students. Judging whether something is a reasonable response is also an essential part. I think this fits with our Take 5 program
• Conceptual Understanding is different than the procedural understanding. The focus should be on the conceptual understanding, which I'm sure most teachers strive for, however, I'm not sure we (me included) put the emphasis in the amount of time we spend on the conceptual vs. procedural. What do we spend our time teaching? How do we teach conceptual instead of procedural or more than procedural? How do we know if they get the concept rather than the procedure? What do we do if they don't get the concept?
• Memorization should follow instruction of conceptual knowledge--this produces mastery of math facts
• The use of patterns is most useful in helping students discover and emphasize the patters in our number systems. Building on previous math facts that they know, provide daily practice, and hold students accountable--including asking for parents support
• Commom Formative Assessments--As described by Ainsworth "They provide participating teachers with the timely feedback needed to differentiage instruction and thus better meet the diverse learning needs of their students." How can we restructure our curriculum to include so much cummulative review? How do formative assessments fit into standards based grading? Our current common assessments are not formative, they are summative. If we want to change our curriculum so that these assessments are formative, what changes need to happen in the pacing and structure of the units and what changes have to happen to the tests? Is MAPS used as a formative assessment? What about upperclass?
• These assessments should be designed collaboratively, classroom (individual--non-common?) end of unit assessment and scoring guide should be designed to match the common formative assessments
• The assessments should be scored and analyzed in data teams.

I would bet that these books have been a heavy influence in our current curriculum and assessment development since I have heard alot of the same language in our curriculum and assessment meetings. Anyone interested in a book goup?

Anyone interested in a book

CCTM- CoMMIT

presented by Jim Hogan, Aurora PS, Melissa Colsman, Cherry Creek PS, and Rachael Coulehan, Aurora PS
CoMMIT stands for Colorado Metro Math Intervention Team (or something very similar). Glenn Bruckhart is participating as well as many other concerned about math and math interventions.
Most of the presentation was around RtI as outlined by CDE.
Most schools have issues with students struggling with Math. This is an informal group that is meeting to discuss the issue and start to collaborate around why this is an issue and what can be done about it. The first thing that was identified was to develop common vocabulary around RtI, general and special education, and math program since the group includes such broad spectrum of participants. Currently, this group is still forming, gaining common vocab and identifying what the questions are. Most interventions discussed at the presentation were not possible due to other factors such as limited district resources, cumbersome such as involving so much paperwork, and unrealistic such as pulling students when there is no time to pull them. Even though there is a lot of ground to cover, it was exciting that this group is working on math interventions with no other political or hidden agendas--everyone just wants to help get students be successful at math.
The next CoMMIT meeting is on Dec 4th from 8am -11am in Littleton and Math on the Planes is scheduled for February 29th and March 1st with CCLD, Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities. For information about these upcoming events contact Rachael Risley at rarisley@aps.k12.co.us

cctm- TI applications

presented by TI rep wgarciano@ti.com, more info at TI's educational website.

• Demoed some of the applications on the TI-84 plus silver addition.
• There is an application to graph inequalities and within that application is a way to graph a vertical line, i.e. X = 3. The other calculators only graphed functions of Y. This X= screen is only available with the inequality graph.
• There are pdfs on the sites of each application that describe the nuts and bolts for students to use it.
• The transformation graphs application looked very useful since that is a hard concept for our students to understand. This application allowed the parent function to be graphed and the constants manipulated manually, or run through an animation that showed dynamically the affects of some of those constants in transformations.
• Looks worth spending some time on students after the initial concept is taught. These calculators are allowed on standardized test such as ACT, AP and IB tests so hopefully this can help.

I am interested to see if these tools help. Maybe some action research within the department so see if they get a better or worse grasp on the concepts and how it helps with problems solving and/or test taking? Anyone interested?

In addition, there is a free TI-Nspire workshop at :

Littleton Education Services Center, 5776 Crocker St., Littleton CO 80120 on

Saturday, October 27, 2007 from 8:30-noon

Register by email asummers@lps.k12.co.us and include name, school, and district