Made 4 Math #9 - The Nitty Gritty

Now that school has started, I don't have any new cutesy ideas to try so it's just down to the nitty gritty.

Since I'm starting sbg this year, I put a lot of time into creating my tracking sheets. I called them "Math to Know" and listed every concept I plan to teach. I made a column for the date but not sure if I will use that for students to write the date I taught it or the date I assessed it. Which one do you think makes more sense?


Then I made four columns labeled 1-4 for students to shade in a horizontal bar chart of their scores (which will align to my Star Wars Holistic rubric). Also, on each concept that appears on our end-of-course exam, I shaded the row gray as a reminder to me and them of what our priorities are.

Keep in mind that we are still transitioning into Common Core so some things I am teaching in Algebra II really belong in Algebra I but I am currently teaching it in both courses to help transition.

I'm sure there will be things I need to add or take out but if nothing else, I think they look really nice and functional.

Here are the downloads for Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II.

Next up, our school is really working on the RtI process. Magically, I have three students who were special ed inclusion for math and this year are in my regular classroom, my biggest class of 28, without any assistance. A fourth student failed my class last year and all year I was telling everyone that this student needed to be back in special ed (somehow had gotten out for reasons unclear to me) and is now back again.

I'm expecting issues so I decided on my own to make a progress monitoring sheet. I am going to track the grades and absences of these four particular students every two weeks. I made a list of interventions that I already do and blank spaces to write in additional interventions. I made a comments section so I can date and detail whatever goes on.

I will also use this on students when I notice a drop in behavior or grades. I went through the whole year and put down specific dates to help keep myself on track. I want the form to be very quick and efficient to use while at the same time showing sufficient data.

Best of both worlds.

Last but not least, I made a graphic organizer based on the PEELS method of summarizing that I blogged about earlier.

Last year we used an index card system that wasn't very effective so this is my 2.0 version of that idea. I will print 4 to a sheet and then we will probably only use these for the priority concepts (shaded in gray above) for now and see how it goes. Of course I want to do it for every single one but I'm not sure how realistic that  is.

I really wanted to use this picture because it cracks me up but we never want to frown on math! 

But it really does crack me up.