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Thin-Slicing Tasks

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Have you heard of thin-slicing tasks?  I hadn't, until I read "Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12" by Peter Liljedahl.  This idea was one of my favorites!  Basically, thin-slicing tasks are questions on a given topic that gradually increase in difficulty.  Students are only given one task at a time to complete. Since I wasn't ready to dedicate a whole period to allow students to learn by thin-slicing tasks, I had to come up with a way to incorporate it.  I decided to do this during Math Workshop.  One of the stations is "Meet with the Teacher" and that is where I used them. This is how I ran it...  I have a table in the back of my room with seats for four students and a large white board on the wall behind the table.  Since I have a class of 28 and need larger group sizes, I used 2-3 desks also, facing the white board.  When students came to that station, all they needed was their calculator.  My setup included: Ind...
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My Blog Journey

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Hello, my name is Nicole Markowski and I have been teaching middle school math for 21 years! I have taught 6th, 7th and 8th grades, but have been in 8th for the last ten"ish" years. (I start to lose track after a while!)  In my school district we "accelerate all", which means we do not have a middle school honors program in math and all 8th grade students take Algebra 1, which ends in the New York State Regents exam, where they earn their first high school credit. Although this program has been successful and we have had a high passing rate, there is much debate surrounding the program. Many teachers feel there should be an alternate option for 8th graders who are not ready for the rigor of the Algebra curriculum or who have failed math in previous years.  With that being said, I am not here to debate the program, but to do my best to meet the diverse needs in my classroom... with a fast-paced curriculum and the pressure to pass a high-stakes exam. 😅 I absolutely l...
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Math Workshop

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  Let's talk Math Workshop!  From googling and searching around, I found that the gist of math workshop is the same but does vary a bit from person to person.  This is how I set mine up to work with 8th graders. M - Meet with the Teacher A  - At your Seat T  - Technology H  - Hands-On These are some of the ideas I use for each station... I have block scheduling so I have a double period (80 minutes) with each class every other day.  I usually need about 10-15 minutes to explain each station for that day so that leaves me with about 15 minutes per station.  In my opinion that is a good amount of time, but I am still tweaking the activities at each station to make sure that each can be completed within a 15 minute time period.  There has been some trial and error.  I have been using slidesmania.com to create slides for this.  It is a great website with tons of free, unique, creative and editable templates to use.  Below is an e...
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