Unit 1, Lesson 1 Translating Expressions {Algebra 1}

Now that I have finished my first whole unit of Algebra 1 interactive notebooks I am so ready to talk about them, share pictures and all my newly gained knowledge on what works and what does NOT work when trying to have 30 high school freshman follow directions.

The first lesson we did was about translating expressions. We spent an entire class period and a half on this because it shows up over and over again in the curriculum.  We started the unit by doing a card sort, where I put students in groups of 3 or 4, and gave them about 30 words on cards to sort into 8 different categories. The eight categories were:

Addition

Subtraction

Multiplication

Division

Exponents

Grouping

Questions

Answers

The only instructions that I gave them were to sort them into the categories and that there were some words that could go into more than one category. I also told them that if I was walking around and asking about their words, they should be able to have an example of why they put each word in the different categories.  This was the first time that some of my students had an activity where there was no one correct answer.  It was very hard for them to wrap their heads around that idea. Once we got past that, it took them about 15 minutes to sort the words and there was a lot of good conversations going on in the groups. (okay, not EVERY group, but most of them were doing what I was asking!) After they were done, I had each group write their words for one of the categories on big chart paper, this was perfect because I knew from the beginning I needed 6 groups (I made one group do questions and answers, and one do exponents and grouping) and I gave each group a different colored marker to write their answers. After each group wrote their initial words, I made them go around in a group (1 person wrote, the others told them what to write and helped decide about the words) and put a check mark next to the words they agreed belonged under the category, circle the words they disagreed with (this gets rid of the ugly "x" marks) and put a question mark next to the ones they aren't sure what they mean.  This worked well in 3 out of my 4 classes. The last class just had one person from each group walk around and the rest stayed seated, even when I told them over and over and OVER to have all group members standing and walking. Once they were done marking them up, we went through each word individually and decided where they should go.  I asked for examples for all words to get students thinking about what the words meant and how they would see them in a math classroom. This also helped me to learn their names because I was calling on students, instead of letting them volunteer. When we were done deciding where each word went and with examples, we wrote it down in our foldable organizer. I referred to this as their "math dictionary" and constantly reminded them that you cannot learn a new language in one day. It takes time, so it's going to take time to get down "math language" too, but that's why we made a dictionary. After pasting it in our notebooks, we did about 10 practice problems below to practice going from verbal to algebraic expressions and vice versa.

The practice problems was where I learned a WHOLE lot about what we can and cannot put in our notebooks. For one thing, I make them keep their notebooks in my classroom in fun colored crates ($2.47 at Walmart!) in the back, labeled with their period. I thought that this would eliminate the "oh I forgot my notebook at home today, I can't take notes" and losing notes. So far, it's worked wonderfully to cut back on this, and I am so happy I made this decision from the beginning. I have had a few misplaced in the wrong crate, but now even if they can't remember what period it is, they know the color of the crate it needs to go into.  Anyways, back to the whole example dilemma.  For my first period "guinea pigs" (I tell them every time we do an interactive notebook lesson that they are my guinea pigs for how it's going to go with the rest of my classes) we had our 10 examples that we cut out on individual rectangles, wrote the answers on the back and then put them in a pocket in our notebooks. Simple enough right? WRONG. This was a complete DISASTER. This is what I felt like:

Except for instead of watermelons all over my classroom, I had tiny pieces of paper with those all important examples all over my classroom. The examples went well and the cutting and the pocket all got put together wonderfully. I knew it was going too well.  When they went to go put away their notebooks, all the examples came falling out, or later when they had to pick them up the next day, again all the examples came falling out and the bottom of their class' crate looked like this:

Whoops. Not good.

 What I decided to do with my other classes was to use the same examples, except write them in the notebooks instead of cutting them out and using a pocket. This went much better. The students learned more from having to write the words, they didn't run out of space on the back of the tiny rectangles, overall, much better this way. Here are the pictures of how my notebook turned out. (I'll add pictures of student notebooks later, they have the same exact examples, just written out instead of in my "examples" pocket)