eMath May Newsletter

Well, it’s finally mid-May, which means that nice weather has returned to upstate New York. It also means that we are hitting the homestretch of the school year, with some schools finishing up quite soon. New York schools don’t finish until the third or fourth week of June, but final exams (Regents Exams) in math come in mid-June.

We have lots of exciting news and one last round of add-ons for this school year. First, we’ll start with the news which is mostly about Common Core Geometry. We are now done with the workbook and are printing up a bunch for summer orders. The answer key is being uploaded as I write this newsletter. It will definitely be available by Memorial Day weekend if not by the end of this week. We continue to record the videos and upload them as they are edited. We hope to have all of Unit 2 uploaded this week. That’s the particularly challenging unit on Transformations and Rigid Motions.

Another exciting set of events we have coming up are our Instagram Live Review sessions for the New York State High School Regents Exams. We will hold one review session for each of Common Core Algebra I, Common Core Geometry, and Common Core Algebra II. We are still settling on final times, but right now here is our proposed schedule:

Common Core Algebra I – Sunday, June 11th  from 3 to 5 p.m.

Common Core Algebra II – Wednesday, June 14th from 6 to 8 p.m.

Common Core Geometry – Thursday, June 15th from 6 to 8 p.m.

We will simply be taking questions from students who are watching the Live Session. We will have all of the previous Regents exams open and can work out questions on any of those or anything else the students throw our way. For those of you not familiar with Instagram, students will have to follow me (@kirkweiler). As well, they will only be able to watch via their phones as Instagram is not a computer or tablet based app (how weird is that?). There may be work arounds for this limitation. We went with Instagram instead of Facebook because we found that most teenagers have Instagram accounts, but not Facebook accounts.

Please do let us know if you have thoughts about the timing of the sessions. We tried to pick what we thought made the most sense after speaking with both students and teachers about it.

Our final round of add-ons for this school year are all about review materials. For each course, we added review quizzes for each unit. These are short, “keep them honest” quizzes that hit on major topics of each unit. They are only 10 points each and are designed to help a teacher get some feedback on where students are at on each unit, without taking up too much time for assessment during this last month of intense review. In Common Core Algebra I, we have a packet of quizzes for Units 4 through 10. For Common Core Algebra II we have these quizzes for all 13 units. For Algebra 2 and Trig, we supply the quizzes for Units 7 through 13.

We will keep posting eMath Newsletters in June and July, but won’t be posting additional add-ons during this time. We will begin to add new ones in the August newsletter, starting with our first round ever of Common Core Geometry add-ons. We plan making the Unit Reviews and Assessments the add-ons for Common Core Geometry next year, which is why the price of those subscriptions are slightly less than others. We don’t know yet what the add-ons will be for the other courses, but plan on exploring Performance Tasks for these courses as well as creating some lessons that address the modifications we are seeing in the Common Core curriculum in New York state.

For now, have a great May! Enjoy Memorial Day weekend and the final sprint. I’ll see you back here in mid-June!!!