Beginning The Algebra ISN

How do we begin?

Well I started off one way last year and this year I am going to start off completely differently.

Last year we did a bunch of things I will call "Me at a Glance" Activities. these took "part" of three class blocks as I interspersed them within the whole first day class expectation talk, and the first unit (Patterns). I basically used Sarah's set up and introductory materials  and they were fun but I'd rather try a different approach this year and make the ISN all about Algebra.

The notebooks

My plan is to hand out the composition notebooks on the second day of class (our district purchases the notebooks for the students - since we do not have textbooks we are able to use textbook funds for this. Doing this we know every student has the same notebook and everyone has one the day we start using them). We use MEAD 100 sheet composition notebooks, college ruled. We'll be doing this after the kids work in groups processing the patterns they worked with for HW (will cover in later blog post). I haven't decided yet if we are going to decorate the cover this year. This past year we just pasted on a title (which I printed out in a number of different colors and fun type faces for students to choose from).

Cover Page

We'll fill in the cover page. Here's my "generic one" - more a reminder for me of what students should have on their page.

QUICK DISCLAIMER - I do not have the best handwriting. I do lots more typing these days so my handwriting has deteriorated. But my students get used to it. My student teacher this year had BEAUTIFUL handwriting - it looked like a font it was so perfect and lovely. But my students know better than to expect that from me. 

Inside Front Cover

 I am going to do a foldable of Mathematical Practice Standards. I refer to these many times during the year and have posters around the room describing them. I was thinking of putting an "Algebra Reference Sheet" on the inside front cover but there are lots of reference pages throughout the notebook so nevermind. Anyhow - found this on line on the "i is a number" blog and it's great!

Then we'll talk a bit about why these ISNs are useful and how we will be using them in class. We don't have textbooks so these essentially will be personal textbooks for Algebra One. All students are responsible for having all the content up to date in their notebooks even if they are absent. So if they miss a class they need to come see me before or after school to get what they missed. Or have a classmate pick it up for them. I could even email them what they miss (with a pdf image of the filled out page).

Table of Contents

Next we'll set up out TABLE OF CONTENTS (TOC). This will become our regular daily routine. On my front board students will see as they come into class SWBAT (with the objectives of the class listed, just an FYI to them, they don't need to copy these) and TOC with the pages listed that we will be using in class that day and that they should set up as soon as they sit down. So here are my table of contents pages for the whole year for Algebra One (2014-2015 school year - CAUTION - do not try to fill out a whole year's worth in advance. You'll be creating this notebook day by day. I'll post soon a blog of "things I learned my first year with ISNs").

The unknown for me was, how many pages was this going to take? Our notebook has 200 in all (but one of those is the cover page and one is page zero). So I got close to using the whole thing!

Our First pages

Finally we'll fill in the first two pages. These are informational but also have a little content for our first unit. I really want to follow the format this year of "Left Side Learning" and "Right Side Reflection". I was pretty good at it this past year but was afraid I'd run out of room and sometimes things got rushed. Also I completely messed up the numbering this past year. If you look inside a book - right hand pages are odd numbered and left hand pages are even numbered. But that means if you start with a left page like I do you have to start with page 0 (zero). I didn't think of that and all year my page numbering completely bothered me as it didn't match the formatting of books. Sigh, this year I'll do it right.

So here are my first two pages:

The foldable and the examples complement what the students had for homework the previous night and worked on sorting in groups at the start of class. So I should get some pretty creative examples on those right hand pages!

And I am just starting to use box.com to file documents that I share on my blog. So here is my first try at sharing documents for the math practice standards foldable and the what is a sequence foldable.