Warm Ups This Year

I know this is absolutely nothing new, just something I am going to try with my Freshmen and Sophomores:  Warm ups that help them think, and talk about their thinking.

I am listing them here so all the links are in one place!

Day 1:  Which One Doesn't Belong?

Day 2:  Estimation 180

Day 3:  Number Talks  (has anyone made a collection of good problems for Number Talks?)

Day 4:  Visual Patterns

Day 5:  Story Problems from Math Forum

What I Hope to Get From Twitter Math Camp 2015 (and what I have already gotten!)

TMC15 is only 2 weeks away!

Yesterday I finally allowed myself to print out the sessions document.  Hubbie kept laughing at me because I would shout, "yes! Going to THAT one!"  and then "oh NO!  This one happens at the same time as THAT one!"

So I threw out a few tweets about some of the topics that I need to get information on and I was flabbergasted at how quickly people responded!

I was hoping to pick the brains of those presenting Desmos, maybe at a different session ( a Flex Session on Saturday afternoon?).  Jedediah (@mathbutler), Glen (@gwaddellnvhs) , Michael F (@mjfenton), and Bob (@bobloch), all jumped in with responses.  Beth Ferguson (@algebrasfriend) shared what she will be presenting to a group of teachers in her district.  All of them offered to do hallway conversations!

I am in the process of reading Making Number Talks Matter and saw that Chris will be doing a session on Number Talks in the elementary school.  Both Chris and Fawn have promised to yak with me about doing Number Talks with older kids.  This sparked quite a bit of interest among tweeps as many chimed in with "Me, too!"

So here are some other things I want to get out of these four days of amazing professional development:

• I hope to get my hands going in learning to teach the distributive property to students who struggle with this concept.  
• I also want to learn to plan units by piecing together some of the amazing resources found through the MTBoS, and/or just do a better job at planning a year, a unit, or a lesson.  
• I am hoping to get better at teaching Algebra 1, and I really want to pick the brains of my roomie, Jasmine, from TMC14 to see how to do a better job at linking Algebra and Geometry.
• I would like to help English Language Learners be more successful in their math classes.
• I want to ask better questions and learn to elicit better questions from my students.  Causing a fight in my classroom may be just the way to get started!
• Building number sense is a passion of mine, including fractions (!!), and I hope to see what others use as tools to help this happen.
• I have been doing Barbie Bungee for years, but Fawn and Matt have a new take on this!
• And I really, really hope someone can help me figure out how to incorporate Number Talks, Estimation 180, Visual Patterns, etc., and STILL have time to fit in "the other stuff".

How I will manage to get to all of these, without the use of time warp technology, is still unknown.

Can't wait!