Summer Camp!

So in a previous post I mentioned how a 7th grade teacher decided to quit/retire a few months into the school year. The students in that class had more subs than I can remember. Needless to say, the parents of these students were not happy. I wouldn't have been either if my son was in that class.

If you don't remember, the students impacted by this craziness were actually some of the brightest students in the school. As seventh graders they were taking the same math my 8th graders were taking- Accelerated Algebra. So basically there were ninety 7th graders taking high school math. Since I was the lead teacher for that course, and the math coach for the school, I was the one that made sure those kids stayed on track.

As a way to ease parents' minds, my admin team decided to offer a week long summer camp for these kids to ensure they were in fact ready to move to the next course- Accelerated Geometry (2nd semester of geometry and all of Algebra II). They also decided to make this free for these students. The idea was for the ACC Geo teacher to hold this camp. Well, since it was free... 48 students signed up! That meant they needed backup and I was their person.

So last week I hit the pause button on my summer and taught these kids. To be honest, I wasn't real thrilled about doing this. I LOVE my summer off. However, the week was actually pretty great. My teammate and I got to pick what we wanted to teach for the whole week! When does that happen during the school year? Not often enough! Having taught ACC Geo this year, my teammate knew where the weaknesses were so that helped us determine topics. Once we had our list, we split them up. Another perk of the camp? It was only from 9am - noon each day. We each had a first period, then we took a snack break, then we switched classes. And other great thing about camp? Nothing was graded and the kids were engaged and wanted to do math during the summer. I know these are the top kids, but it makes we wonder, if something like this was offered for all students, how many would come? How many would take more risks if they weren't being graded? I think this is something that needs to be explored more.

One of the topics for the week were the different forms of quadratic functions. I almost love quadratics as much as I love summer. Okay, maybe not that much.  :  )

Here is one of my favorite activities for this topic. I sadly didn't have time to do this with my own classes this year. Having my camp kids do this task reminded me how good it is though and I'm going to make it a point to include it in my plans this year.

Basically students work with a partner to match graphs of quadratics with their equations. Some equations are all filled out, but most had students convert standard form to intercept form and/or vertex form. This is also a shameless plug for my session on FALs at TMC18. I'll give you more info then! (I'll try to post a better quality picture too.)