Math 10C Measurement Unit Plan

Thanks to my mentor teacher Debbie, I now have a working template for Unit Plans. I thought I would share it for the world to see how awesome she is!
 

I've been using this template to complete a Calculus Unit Plan as well as a Math 9 Unit Plan.  As I keep teaching I am certain that they will slowly get filled in! I'm convinced that filling these in as I go is way easier than filling them all in at once.

Here's a link to my live document on Google Docs.

Enjoy!

The Product Rule

This whole teaching thing is just so fantastic I really don't know where to start!  I think though that there is  an obvious lack of hands on activities out there! For inequalities for example, I was able to find one activity that happened to be a story reading activity that I'm totally going to turn into a story writing activity.  You'd think by now that enough universities have forced students to write lesson plans that there would be an online database of hands-on activities for nearly every concept in mathematics!

This week was teachers conference! Wow! There was a lot of great ideas being thrown around.  I went to a great 4 hour session on physics labs, argued about how things should be measured, watched a fantastic comedy act, and started to wish I had a class set of iPads.  But not everyone can be that lucky.  

I'm starting to realize that most of the ideas covered in physics can become great mathematics activities! Especially considering the new curriculum here in Alberta.  So here are a couple ideas I came across and highly recommend turning into math labs!

Focal point calculations!  Graphing diameter vs. distance gives a linear relationship!

Using isometric fabric to explain gravity wells and charges!  I'd have to look into this more but it's a fantastic hands on explanation of electric fields and point charges.

Lasers to find the distance between data on a cd! I should really have a program of studies out right now.

A box and candies to explain half lives! I'm thinking calculus or exponential functions!

Toy trains to explain vectors and vectors with velocity! Cheap and awesome! Math 30 material.

There was one more that I didn't get a picture of.  It involved some springs hanging from chairs to calculate spring constants.  Just too cool!  I'm excited because my math classes are gonna be awesome!

To continue my calculus geogebra interlude I have here the product rule examples I'm using.  Now because not all the examples are super interesting to look at I don't go over the uninteresting functions with geogebra in my class. A great idea that I haven't been able to make work yet (thank you Audrey @a_mcsquared) is to insert a geogebra sketch google gadget into a google doc (spreadsheet) so that I can watch as students play around with it!  In this manner anyone could play with it and all the students could see their riends playing with it live. 

 If anyone figure it out please let me know! And if you take any of these ideas and turn them into labs please please please send them to me!

No Smartboard Allowed!

After talking to my 10C Mentor Teacher I have decided to try something a little different.  Mainly because she has challenged me to teach without a smartboard.  WHO TEACHES WITHOUT A SMARTBOARD?! This is the twenty-first century! With twenty-first century teachers! Breath Darcy Breath.  Okay I'm calmed down now... so apparently sometimes projectors break down or smartboards crash and there is no other choice than to work with a whiteboard.  So in lieu of it all breaking down she has asked me to teach without one.  All I'm allowed to use it for is to put up questions.  Bleh.  

So I'm gonna try this:

And I think it will work, I've never tried it.  We shall see... I have to do a whole review session so I'm gonna do it like 7 times in the same class and see how it goes.  Crossing my fingers here!

Also This teacher has some great ideas and this cardomatic is one of them!  I think I'll try it!