Between the warm weather, sun shining, and spring break approaching the students are ready to get outside. You may have noticed that this time of year is harder for students to stay focused. I find that activities help with this focus. This is one activity which is easy to set up and complete. First, I have students write out the problems from a set on the board. I show 75-100 problems on the board and they pick 8 to write on their paper. Yes, you will have some duplicates but this saves times. I have done a similar activity where I wrote out and cut out all of the problems and it took several days to set up. Also, have the students cut out the problems and place them in the eggs. I recommend having a basket or bin in your classroom to collect completed eggs. Next, you hid the eggs the next day for students. I have clipboards in my room so students can grab a clipboard and we head outside. They will find and solve 8 eggs. Once they have completed an egg, they can hide the
The norm in recent years seems to be that students feel they have to be perfect and get every question correct all of the time. Trying to be perfect and never messing up seems to have led to very stressed students in the classroom. What happens when they do make a mistake? How do they react if they don't get a 100%? During the 2nd semester, I started going over the most missed questions as a class. Typically, I would make notes on the student's paper about the missed question. I pulled up the questions and we discussed why it was missed, how you could get that wrong answer, and what we would do differently. This may seem simple but it started to help students see that they weren't alone. Second, it helps them analyze what happened to get the incorrect answer. I believe this is just as important in the understanding process. For example, with reflections we looked at the distractors of going over the wrong axis or writing an ordered pair as (y,x). After reviewing