Happy November math teachers! Now that we’ve gotten the major candy holiday out of the way, it’s time for the weather to get a lot colder and the days to get a lot shorter. As the holiday season approaches, we are working hard at eMATHinstruction to flesh out our new Next Generation aligned middle school books as well as continuing to supplement our high school courses with their monthly add-ons. Let’s get right into those.
Our Common Core Algebra I Add-Ons this month include some assessment items and a practice problem set. First, we bring you a set of practice problems for Unit 4 (Linear Functions and Arithmetic Sequences) on writing the equation of a line given two points that lie on the line. This is an essential skill and fluency expectation at the Algebra I level. We include both standard and applied problems for practice. We also have the Form D of the Unit 4 Assessment. Finally, we also offer our Unit 5 (Linear Systems) Exit Tickets. We were just recently at the AMTNYS conference in Rochester and we heard back from a lot of teachers who are loving the exit tickets. Some of them are using them as Do Nows the day after the lesson, a suggestion we wanted to pass along.
In our Common Core Geometry Add-Ons we bring you both the Unit 4 (Constructions) and Unit 5 (Coordinate Geometry) Exit tickets. My hope is that we are now ahead of where teachers are in each course in terms of the Exit Tickets. We know you need these at the beginning of the unit and will continue to turn them out each month. We also bring you the Unit 4 Form C Assessment. Unit 4, as mentioned, is on Constructions, so take a look at all three assessments we now have for Unit 4 and mix as needed.
This month in our Common Core Algebra II Add-Ons we bring you four items. First, we bring you mid-unit quizzes in both Unit 3 (Linear Functions) and Unit 5 (Sequences and Series). Both of these units are quite short, so we hadn’t written quizzes for them, but we heard from teachers that they liked to have these mid-unit quizzes, even for the shorter units, so we wrote one for each of these (one already existed for Unit 4). We also bring you the Unit 4 (Exponential and Logarithmic Functions) Form D Assessment. Finally, we also have the Unit 5 Exit tickets out for use.
In Algebra 2 with Trigonometry Add-Ons this month we have a practice lesson and a few assessment items. To begin, we have a practice set of problems on the quadratic formula from Unit 4 (Radicals and the Quadratic Formula). This practice set gives students ample opportunity to use the formula in both standard and applied settings and has the kids express their answers in a variety of ways (rational, simplest radical form, and rounded). We also bring you the Form C Assessment for Unit 4. Our final add-on for Algebra 2 with Trigonometry are the Unit 5 (Complex Numbers) Exit Tickets.
In other news, we are working hard on the N-Gen Middle School math series as well as our high school courses. We are spending about two weeks each month recording videos. We will post them as we finish and edit them. Some videos are already up in each of the three courses and we hope to add quite a few more before the Thanksgiving break.
Finally, I’d like to give a shout-out to all of the fantastic teachers, administrators, and general math educators who I met this past week at the AMTNYS (Association of Mathematics Teachers of New York State) Conference in Rochester, New York. It was a long two days for both myself and my fantastic wife Shana, but the conversations we had with teachers were deep and thoughtful. We received wonderful feedback on both our high school and middle school courses. A special thanks and congratulations to Dana Morse, the hardest working (and best dressed) Texas Instruments calculator expert I’ve even met. He brings the fun and received an award from AMTNYS for always being a friend to math teachers around New York.
That’s it for now. I’m starting to record videos for N-Gen Math™ 6 within the next hour, so I need to get back to that. Have a great Thanksgiving break everyone. Get some rest and get ready for the craziness that we know as December.
Kirk