eMath August Newsletter

Hello my math teacher friends. To those on vacation still, I hope your August is relaxing and Labor Day weekend doesn’t arrive too soon. For those of you back in classes, I hope the beginning of the school year is going well and you are starting to get to know all of your little angels (or angles :-).

We are doing a ton over at eMATHinstruction. Within days (or even hours), we will be relaunching our website and coming out with some very exciting new software by an awesome company called Efofex. But, more on that in another post coming soon. I’ll also be posting preliminary Common Core Geometry materials. But, that is also deserving of its own post.

The relaunch will allow users more control over their Membership pages. You will be able to add additional subscription codes as well as other features. The launch will occur at night, so hopefully none of you will be stuck without our site in the middle of your class day.

We just published our first round of Course Add-Ons. These are the additional curricular items that come with the Teacher Plus subscription to our courses. Many of these curricular resources were created based on excellent feedback that I received in a Facebook post. I’ll keep doing these posts to get more ideas. Feel free to add your voice to the conversation. You can check out what I’ve created under the Course pages, but I’ll give you a little description here.

In Common Core Algebra I, I decided to make up a mid-unit quiz and created two forms of it so that you have a back-up for that student who is already absent after only 6 days of school. The quiz covers through Lesson 6 (Seeing Structure in Expressions). I also created a Unit 1 Skill Building set. This set of problems covers through Lesson 5 and is good for the student who needs more practice identifying properties and simplifying simple linear expressions. Finally, I created a Warm-Up lesson on solving one and two-step equations. This is particularly good to assign to students or use in class before beginning Unit 2. Students are expected to be fluent in linear equation solving after 8th grade Common Core, but we know that many of them will need this basic brush-up before moving on to solve more challenging equations.

Now, for Common Core Algebra II, I’ve created three new resources to start off the year. I thought it would be good to have a Form B of the Unit #1 Formative Assessment. This test exactly mirrors the one that is under Common Core Algebra II Unit Assessments. It could be used as a make-up, a re-take, or even if you wanted to pass out two forms of the test at the same time (wandering eyes…). Besides the test, I also created two additional curriculum resources. One of these is an additional set of problems to help students work with interpreting graphs of functions. We all know how students can struggle with reading graphs, especially when it comes to functions. This worksheet could be used toward the end of Unit 2 in order to reinforce graphical ideas. I also created an additional set of problems on Inverse Functions. Although it is early in the course, students can easily become confused about inverses and this set of problems hits all the main ideas.

Finally, for Algebra 2 and Trigonometry, I modified the two resources on Graphs of Functions and Inverses of Functions to fit the emphases and timeline of Algebra 2 with Trigonometry (see above paragraph). As well, I created a Unit quiz for Unit #1 that can be used as a take-home or a short in-class quiz.

Every month, around the middle of the month, until June, I will be putting out the eMath Newsletter where I’ll release the add-ons and discuss the issues of the day. I’ll always make sure to announce the Newsletter on our Facebook page, and encourage our Members to give us comments there in terms of what resources they’d like to see us create next month.