Overview

I was a first-year teacher at DCP-Alameda during the 2008-2009 school year. I was in charge of planning and teaching a remedial math class called Numeracy. As a first year teacher, the curriculum changed throughout the year as I tried to discover myself as a teacher. For example, I did not consistently give warm-ups until the second unit (but they do appear sporadically in the first unit). Also, I introduced "minute quizzes" halfway through the first unit, and I continued using them for the rest of the school year. Eventually, the format I (usually) settled on was: minute quiz → warm-up → notes → classwork (just a couple problems from the homework) → ALEKS. To make grading the warm-ups and notes easier, I created a Warm-up & Notes Checker. I also color-coded the checkers to make them easier to distinguish week-by-week.

Minute Quiz Generator

I created an application (using Automator, which comes with Mac OS X) that generates minute quizzes. You can download the disk image for it here. It contains three files: the application, a template, and a readme file. Please consult the "readme.txt" file for instructions on installing and using the application.

Calendar & Standards

The following documents provide an overview of the school year. Note that Numeracy tends to have fewer units than other classes, but each unit is longer (particularly the unit on fractions).

The following documents contain DCP's and California's standards.

Semester 1

Unit 1 - Integers

Unit 2 - Fractions

Unit 2 Continued - Fraction Circles (Manipulatives)

As evident on the unit 2 comprehensive test, many students were still struggling with fractions, so I decided to continue the unit rather than start a new one. This time, however, I made greater use of manipulatives (fraction circles).

Semester 1 Final

Semester 2

Unit 3 - Decimals

Unit 4 - Polynomials

The purpose of this unit is to prepare students for the Algebra 1 STAR test (since all Freshmen are in Algebra 1). I chose to do STAR prep has a regular unit to prevent students from being inundated by STAR prep in all their classes. That is, we were doing STAR prep without them knowing it.

Unit 5 - Percents

This unit is based on Prentice Hall California Pre-Algebra, chapter 6: Ratios, Proportions, and Percents.

(Unit 6) Exhibition - "A Day in the Life"

For this project, students determine the percent of time they spend doing various activities in a 24-hour cycle and present it as a pie chart graph. Students spend half of each class period working on ALEKS and the other half working on the exhibition.

I got the idea for this project from a colleague. Her master teacher first created this project, although I created all these worksheets.

Semester 2 Final

Since polynomials are an Algebra 1 topic rather than a Numeracy topic, I decided to only test students on decimals and percents. Also, I created the unit on polynomials to prepare students for the Algebra 1 STAR. The semester 2 final is simply the unit 3 (decimals) and unit 5 (percents) tests put together. In fact, the practice test is the unit 3 practice test and unit 5 practice test put together, and the actual test is a mixture of problems from the unit 3 and 5 actual tests.

Page Last Updated: May 17, 2017

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