Its been a little while since I posted anything, but have some good news to share.

After the Chapter 3 exam, average scores dropped significantly from the first exam.  You might say how is that good news to share?  Well, after a great discussion with my students, we all discovered that homework outside of the classroom was not done as much, hardly at all, compared with the homework done during Chapter 1.  The discussions when working on problems was still great, utilizing the communicate and critique SMP daily.

Students made a challenge between my two classes to see which class would have the better exam average on the next chapter exam.  So far I have seen homework much more improved during chapter 5.  It's comparable to the way they worked during chapter 1.  I am excited to see scores for this one, especially since we now have a class challenge and they seem very motivated to beat my other class!

I went to the computer lab to work on our Section 5.3, which is on points of concurrency:  circumcenter, incenter, centroid and orthocenter.  This is hard material, but I found that working on the computer really helped them identify the different points discussed.  Then we came back, and all I did was ask them to summarize what they learned, and I was very impressed that they could determine what point of concurrency went with what construction from the triangles.  

It was a great activity, but some students wondered why?  So I made them draw their kitchen and told them we were going to remodel it so that the new island sink would be the same distance from the oven, the refrigerator and the dishwasher.  They now are looking at the different points of concurrency and trying to figure out which one will allow the best remodel to happen.  I look forward to their responses.