Animal Cells

I've been teaching both Biology and Physical Science for the last 10 years aside from my Math Courses and since the interactive notebooks worked so well in math I thought it would be a good idea to move them into my science classes as well.  This was not as easy as I had thought and I didn't get as many pages done in Biology last year that I had hoped.  However, this one on Animal Cells was one of my favorites.

This page covered identify the organelles in an animal cell as well as identifying the function of each organelle. I know that the function of each organelle is far more in depth than what I covered but my students have a hard time with concepts that they can not see or experience so I had to keep it simple and to a minimum. This is where you could go more in depth with your classes if this page works for you.

I each of my students a colored sheet of paper as well as the sheet of the diagrams (you can find it here!) They cut flaps that fit each of the diagrams, colored them each a different color than glued them onto the page.

Above each of the flaps we identified what the organelle in the picture was and under each flap we stated what the function was.

The large diagram we glued onto the right page.  Students then had to color the organelle the same color as they had done on the flap and then draw arrows and identify the organelles.  

Laws of Exponents

Every time I teach a unit on Polynomials (I know with my population of students) that I will need to start off going over the different Laws of Exponents.  In the past it always turned out to be a jumbled mess of notes that the students could never use or refer back to because you pretty much needed deciphering key just to understand it.  I tired a good handful of different foldables to get the information across but it just never worked.  I gave up and went on a google search to find someone way smarter than me who had already figured out what I couldn't.  Lo and behold Mrs. Williams came to the rescue with an awesome foldable, check out her blog!

Here are my instructions on how to put it together and the problems I used...

Materials Needed:

2 - 8 1/2" x 11" sheets of paper (2 different colors)

Scissors

Favorite writing utensil  

Start with one of your colored sheets.  Fold it in half and cut it.  Then fold one of the halves in half and cut it again.  You will need 2 of the strips you just made.

 

                                          So now here are the supplies each student will need!
                                     



Take the large sheet of paper and turn it so it's landscape, fold it in half, and then fold it in half again.  It should be folded like an accordion.  Lay it on the desk so that it looks like a W when you look at it from the front. (This is super important!)

Grab the middle part of the W and cut it into 4 equal sections just until the fold. (If you don't cut to the fold the smaller strips will be hard to weave in and out.)

Now lay it back down on the table, again so it's a W, and weave the two smaller pieces in.  The center should look like a checker board.  Now you are done!

 

 

The magic to this foldable is if you put the two center pieces together, to make a point in the middle, you can pull the two pieces of paper apart to reveal a secret section.  This foldable always blows the kids minds!

         

Here is how I used it for the Laws of Exponents.

The Coordinate Plane

Before winter break I introduced the Coordinate Plane to my Algebra class.  Let's just say working with a number line was challenging enough for a few of my students but now we combined two number lines together to form a Coordinate Plane was pretty unheard of by some of them.  Trying to explain this to a few of them resulted in me getting looks like I had grew horns and shot fire out of my mouth.  We pushed through and in the end I became Ms. O again.

 Students were given a double sided page where they cut on the dotted lines and folded on the solid ones.  It created a four flap foldable where each flap was one of the four quadrants.  I added the font so all they had to do was color it in.

When you open up each of the flaps it reveals that quadrant on a coordinate plane.  On the inside of the flap is where students filled out information about that specific quadrant.












In the middle was grid paper where the students created the two number lines and labeled the different parts of the coordinate plane. We then practiced plotting and naming points in each of the quadrants.

For the right side of their notebooks I gave them two graphs, one blank and one with points.  The top graph (blank) is where I gave them points and they had to plot them.  The bottom graph (with points) is where the students had to practice naming them.

For homework that night I have them those fun sheets where they plot the points and it forms animals or easily recognizable objects.  The kids loved these because they knew right way if they did it right or not.  I found a few on MathCrush.

Mathcrush.com

It was pretty interesting to see what some of my students came up with when they returned.  A few had some deformed fish or birds, so I knew they needed more practice but everyone else knew what to do and was ready to move on.

Here are the links to the foldable, it's two pages that you print off double sided.  Everything lines up correctly.  Enjoy!

Coordinate Plane Interior
Coordinate Plane Exterior

Solving Linear Equations

The last pages in our ISN before my students took their first big test, after starting the ISN, was on Solving Linear Equation with Variables on Both Sides of the Equal Sign.  I wanted to do a foldable that I had seen used in a science class before, it's call the Layered Book.

The only thing different is that I don't glue the pages together we just staple them at the top. 

 This foldable gave us a tab for each of the five steps and space to solve the sample problem.  To create this I took 3 different colored sheets of paper and cut them in half (profile direction). I had them already pre-grouped for the students so when they came in all they had to do was pick which color combination they liked.

We started off titling it, then putting our first step on the tab, along with the sample problem on the distribute tab.  We continued until we were finished.  We performed each step  when we were on that tab.  We rewrote the simplified equation on the next tab and performed the next operation.

On the right hand side I gave the the students a few sample problems for us to work out together.  Then a sheet of problems they had to complete on their own.  They taped the page over our worked out problems (like a flap) so that they could still see them and use them as reference as they completed theirs.


**Proud Teacher Moment**

A day or two later I gave my students their first test on Solving Linear Equations.  We went from one-step equations all the way to what you see above.  I gave it to them the day before we went on Thanksgiving Break, and I was terrified to grade them in fear they would not do as well as I had hoped.  So I waited until Sunday evening before I went to bed to grade them, and I couldn't have been more proud of my kids.

The LOWEST grade was an 89%, I almost cried.  On Monday when I passed back their tests they were pretty proud of themselves!

Distributive Property

Before Thanksgiving I introduced the distributive property to my Algebra kids and we created our next ISN pages (7 and 8 for those keeping track).

I gave each of my students a strip of teal paper and we folded it half and then in half again.  We wrote Distributive Property on the front.

On the inside of the folded paper it shows all of the different forms of the distributive property using both positive and negative integers.

I'm not all that impressed with this one, and it's something I'm considering changing for next year but in the end it did it's job.

Underneath the fold-able we talked about where this step would fit into our order of steps for Solving Linear Equations and listed our new set of steps underneath it.

On the right page we defined the distributive property up at the top and highlighted the word.  I then gave them 3 basic Distributive Property problems, for example 3( x + 4).  Had them highlight where they saw the Distributive Property, then work it out.


I then gave them 2 equations that contained all 4 of their Solving Equation steps.  Again the students had to highlight where in the problem they saw the distributive property and then work it out.  The students where then given a half sheet of paper that contained problems on it that they taped over their class practice, like a flap so they could still lift the paper up to see the practice problems.  They again had to do the highlighting and solve.  Below are the problems I gave them on the half sheet.

**UPDATED PICTURES OF THE RIGHT SIDE**

 

One-Step Equations

Last week we covered solving one-step equations in my Algebra class.  Here are the pages we created in our Interactive Student Notebook (ISN).

 These are pages 3-4 in our notebooks.  I didn't start the ISN at the beginning of the year so there would have been many more pages before this one.

On the left side is the fold-able I made on the computer and printed off for the students. (template below)

The beginning of the period looked a lot like art class with the kids coloring and cutting it out, but they had an excellent time.

Next, we filled out the fold-able with each type of one-step equation.  It is the kind of problem, not the operation you perform to solve for x.

The top of the flap was completed with the step needed to solve that particular problem, and the base was a worked out sample problem of each kind.

On the right side of the notebook were our notes and practice problems.  At the top, we discussed the vocabulary words: Constant and Coefficient.  A definition and example were given for each word.  You will notice in the problems the students were asked to highlight where/in which problems they saw those vocabulary words.

After each question, we talked about how to substitute each found value back into the equation to determine if they performed the correct operation.

At the very bottom of the right side, I asked students to summarize in 1 sentence how to solve one step equations and what they came up on their own blew my mind..."Perform the opposite operation to solve for x"  **Proud teacher moment**

**UPDATE**
I'm not sure exactly why this post is not letting people download the foldable but below is a link to my Google file for the foldable.

One-Step Equations Foldable