Friday, August 28, 2009

Making Math Journals

With the new school year upon us, it was time to get our new math journals up and running. E10 and R9 were the only two doing the journals last year so I had J4 and I-7 put one together and then we added to them all.

J4's journal cover- he's a good tracer though not so much interested in the correct letter formation just yet

I-7 decided on a geometric design for his cover

A look at our categories
The journals are broken down into:
  • Responses- Life of Fred work will likely go here, student response to particular kinds of problems
  • Challenges- brainteasers and other more challenging assignments
  • Research- assignments to investigate a mathematician or concept and the results
  • Notes- vocabulary, directions on concepts
  • Hands On- could be games or activities for math practice
  • Copywork- whatever might make a nice copywork assignment or vocabulary that sort of thing
  • Fun Stuff- puzzles, games, etc
  • 5-A-Day Problems- these are the Math on the Level daily review problems
Some of these may turn out to be redundant for us and if that's the case, we'll just pull a few categories. The high/low game went into the Hands On section.

We are excited about math this year. Wish I'd done this years ago!

10 comments:

Amber said...

Thank you for sharing this. I have been wanting to make a math journal, but I wasn't sure where to start!

Amy @ Hope Is the Word said...

Love this idea! Thanks for sharing the details!

Dana said...

I really like this post for a few reasons. First, I didn't really know where to start on math journals either. Second, I hadn't heard of Life with Fred before. It looks great! I ordered fractions for the kids and hubby wanted calculus for himself.

Heather said...

Dana...I want Calculus pretty bad!!! I can't wait to see what Fred does with Calculus.

We love Fred. I hope you enjoy him too and shipping is free right on the Polka Dot Publishing website.

Fairly local said...

The journals look great! We just started ours.

Kylie said...

Thanks so much for this post. I'm also a 'had no idea where to start' person so this has really helped. I am looking forward to seeing more math journal posts in the future.

Unknown said...

Wow. Yours are so organized. :-) We just slap it all in one binder without much thought.

Would you like to submit this to the CM carnival? It would be great!

Nikki said...

This is a great idea!
I have never thought about making a FUN math journal like this!
We do things like this for Social studies, science, and language arts, but not math!

sarah in the woods said...

I really like your math notebooks and the way you so math. I'm just learning about living math and this post is a great help.

Jamie {See Jamie blog} said...

Looks great! Thanks for sharing!