As I walked back home after dropping my daughter off at school this morning, I was shocked to realize that this weekend is Memorial Day weekend! It's crazy how relative time is and how aware of what day/week/month it is as a teacher, but when it's summer break (or in my case, my parental leave) how easy it is to not be aware of the day/week.
Desmos Math 6-A1 Curriculum
Anyway, today I wanted to reflect on something else new that I tried this year and will be using more of next school year, the Desmos Math 6-A1 curriculum. I have used Desmos activities in my math classes for years now, because they are amazing, and I definitely had a few core ones that I would use every year in specific units. Back in March (the longest month of the school year) I came across an email to try the Desmos Math 6-A1 curriculum for a free trial. Wanting to check it out and try out something new with my students, I decided to check it out. It worked out well that both my 7th graders and 8th grade Algebra 1 students were starting new units, so I said why not? And am I glad that I did! My 7th graders were going to work on the Exponents & Scientific Notation 8th grade unit and my 8th graders were going to work on the Exponential Functions Algebra 1 unit. Not only was it easy to jump right into, as someone who was familiar with the structure of Desmos activities, the order of the lessons does a really fantastic job of building on what students notice/wonder/explore and going from the concrete to the abstract (Dan Meyer wrote about this very idea just today).
After looking into the units & lesson structure more, I got even more excited about the curriculum, so much so that I asked my principal to purchase it for the 2023-2024 school year and luckily she said yes! I am very much looking forward into digging into the units & lessons more and using it as my primary curriculum next year in my 7th and 8th grade Algebra 1 classes. Any teacher will tell you that no curriculum on it's own is perfect, but I am excited to see how I can use this problem-based curriculum to help put my student's ideas at the center, develop their conceptual understanding, support their procedural fluency and productive disposition, and use mathematical modeling to help them apply & connect what we are learning to the real world.
Delta Math & Brilliant.org
Two other websites that I have used the past few years and will continue using with students next year are Delta Math and Brilliant.org. I have always used Delta Math for skill practice but this year I tried out using it for tests and then re-takes. Again, for someone who has used it in the past, it was very easy to try out these features. Delta Math is free, but they also have paid versions, and Integral is 100% worth it.
This year I also started using Brilliant.org's Daily Challenges (now Puzzles) as my warm up questions. A few years ago I had worked through Brilliant's 100 Day Summer Challenge on my own for fun and then back in December I got an email about Brilliant for Educators. My students participated in the Daily Challenge Challenge back in February, and some of them got really into it. Next year I hope to integrate Brilliant even more, along with our other math competitions - Sigma, Math Olympiad, Math League & Noetic.
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