Thursday, May 10, 2012

Curriculum materials and resources

Math Department - Access to computer carts, use of document camera, white boards, manipulatives such as wood blocks in a variety of geometric shapes, calculators.  Most of this depends on what you come up with on your own.  
 School District The district has planned course statements that list the curriculum for each course.  


Virtual -Classzone.com is our publisher's website that has tutorials, power points, practice tests & problems. good resource

Closure

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After watching the video I had intended to use for my closure example, I decided that this older video was a better one to go with.  It turns out to be more of a transitional example as I am moving from general parallelograms into more specific types.  Knowing what I know now about closure, I would have made the following changes.  1) I would NOT ask rhetorical questions because I am not really assessing how well they understood me.  For example, I would NOT ask "so you guys remember all of the characteristics of parallelograms, right?" (and then just keep moving on) Rather, I would call on a specific student to list the characteristics, preferably an average student.  I did it a second time later on where I said "opposites are also equal, right?"  Next time, I should say, "why is this true" or "what do we know about opposite angles in this type of figure?"  To me, closure is an opportunity to assess students' understanding of material from prior lessons.  I do not feel like I did my best job on this closure piece, but as a result of my awareness and the feedback from my mentor teacher, I have since improved.  I now feel confident in my ability to assess students during the closure process and I understand how to go about it.  It was important that I moved around the classroom to keep students motivated and provide them guidance and then I also came back to them later to share their answers, keeping them accountable.