This will be my third year using Mental Math Mondays, as I mentioned in my Bell Ringers 2.0 post. It's my favorite and it's my way of spiraling before I knew what that was. All the questions are middle school content and students remember learning the concepts but not exactly how to do them.
Since last year was my first year doing INBs, it didn't take students long to point out how nice it would be to have something in their notebook to help them with MMM. Which means they were in the habit of looking in their notebooks yayyyyy.
I promised them I would but let that slide to the back of my mind until I saw Sarah's Math Tools post. I stole some of it from hers and the rest is based off the questions asked in MMM and anything I felt like I had to repeat all year. Like what order the quadrants are named in or which sign means greater than.
Now I can be less helpful in so many more ways! (cackles)
These will probably be the first four pages in their INB (after a ToC). Last year I did learning styles and some other stuff that we never looked at again. So we'll start with this and add in some calculator stuff- you know things that are actually useful.
Do you see anything I'm missing or any errors? Their notebooks have a multiplication chart, some conversions, and something else pre-printed on the back cover so I didn't put those here.
What things do you wish students knew how to do on calculators (TI-83/84)?
For me the most common things are graphing equations, square roots, exponents, cube root, entering data in lists, trace, and tables.
On their graphing calculators, I wish students know how to find zeros, maxima & minima of graphs. Also converting fractions to decimals and vice versa. Desmos is so much more intuitive, but it's still necessary that we equip students with basic graphing calculator tools.
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