Today, I want to answer a couple of questions I received in my e-mail. I hope that my answer can help more than just the teacher who sent in the question. Since I'm hoping this will become a regular thing on the blog, I even made a cute picture for these posts. :)
By the way, I'm terrible at replying to e-mails with questions. Hopefully this will help me get better at answering these types of e-mails.
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By the way, I'm terrible at replying to e-mails with questions. Hopefully this will help me get better at answering these types of e-mails.
The Question
1) How do you give your students practice problems (where do you get them from, how do you present them)?
2) Do you have students write down their working out of practice problems in their INBs or do you find that it's not necessary?
My Answer
This is one way in which my approach to interactive notebooks is changing. When I first started doing interactive notebooks with my students, I was very controlling of what went on each page. I wanted my students to have notebooks that were identical to mine. We would do a few problems in our notebooks, but the majority of our practice happened on individual white boards. Several of my students started asking if they could include some of the whiteboard problems in their notebooks. I tried to making up a modified page numbering system to accommodate this. If we took notes on page 7 and students wanted to take extra notes, I would have them number these extra pages as 7B, 7C, etc. This was a hassle, and my students never really caught on.
This year, I've given up on page numbers. As long as my students have the notes in their notebooks, I've decided it doesn't really matter what page the notes are on. It is nice to be able to tell the class to open up to page 52 to reference something, but I think it's more important to have my students taken ownership of their notebooks. I've started to recognize that some of my students need lots and lots of practice problems in their notebooks. Other students benefit more from having a few practice problems in their notebooks and doing the rest of the problems on their dry erase boards.
So, I've started giving my kids an option. We start a new concept by getting out our notebooks. After taking notes and doing a few practice problems, I pause and give them the option to keep their notebooks out or to transition to a dry erase board for the rest of our practice time. My students who need the notes know that they need the notes. My students who prefer the boards often do so because they know that they are more willing to take risks in solving problems when mistakes can be wiped away with a swipe of the finger.
For next year, I think I'm going to have students number pages according to the learning goal. So, I can say turn to the notes for learning goal 14. This may be a different page number for each student, but we should still be able to reference our notes together as a class when necessary.
It comes down to knowing your students and what they need. I'm learning to be less controlling in certain areas because I know it's what's best for my students.
As to your first question, I get practice problems from a variety of sources. I frequently use problems from the free sample Kuta worksheets. I also keep a textbook or two around to steal problems from. But, my most frequent source for problems is the Test and Item Specs and Released EOI Items from the Oklahoma Department of Education. I try to expose my students to the wording they will see on their end-of-instruction exams. I also frequently just do google searches for various topics and steal worksheets and practice problems from other teachers on the Internet.