Compiling the wisdom of OUR/IM 8th grade teachers from around the country to make these tip sheets for teacher in my district. These tips DO NOT replace a thorough reading of the AMAZING teacher notes provided by the authors at Illustrative Mathematics. Begin your lesson planning there. You can find those linked here.

The number one tip that applies to every lesson, every week all year is be clear what math you are trying to teach in that lesson.

From my post entitled Digging into Planning:

“Having a clear grasp of what exactly you are trying to accomplish in the day will make sense of everything you are doing. It will also help your activity and lesson synthesis be clearer and to the point.”

Now to the details . . .

Lesson 1.5

Several teachers reported that students were happy to be doing instead of describing transformations in this lesson, and teachers were happy to be back to the more comfortable rectangular grid paper.

Tip one – One of the biggest huddles seems to be getting students to read and decide for themselves what they are supposed to do.  Take some time as a class to read and decode the directions for 5.2 before turning students loose.

Tip two – Don’t over teach. Look back at the learning goals:

• Apply transformations on a coordinate grid.
• Apply transformations on a line segment on a coordinate grid.

Kids do have a chance to notice patterns as they reflect over the x and y axis, which is a great opportunity for higher DOK thinking, but it is not the goal of the lesson.  If you do the translations so they can notice the pattern, you instruction is not aligned to your goal.  

Tip three – If  number 3 of your pre-assessment showed many students struggling with naming and using the coordinate grid, this lesson is an opportunity to address that before you get heavily into using the coordinate axes to explore slope and graph lines. Start that with the warm up. In 5.2, dwell on part c of question 1. In question 2, think together about where (13, 10) would be, and where (13, -20) and (13, 570) would be in relation to (13,10)

Tip four – Some students are confused about why activity 5.3 doesn’t use A’, B’ notation. Here is why: Since AB is going to be transformed several times, we would have lots of points with the same name.

This comes up again on the cool down, where students have difficulty with naming corresponding points using letters other than A’, B’, etc.  Before handing out the cool down, you could used the graph from the warm up to practice this by labeling the original triangle CAT and telling them the translation took triangle CAT to triangle DOG.

An extra after visiting classrooms: Did you notice that the warm up offers an alternative way to describe direction and distance in a translation? Read again. The test implies that either way is a complete  and precise method for defining a translation.

 

Lesson 1.6

This is your first day using MLR4: Info gap  (Math Language Routine 4)

Ideas for how to introduce from around the web:

• Morgan Stipe shared a video to help train your students on how the info Gap Routine works.
• Norma Gordon and Sheila Jaung shared an activity builder on Desmos that uses a 7th grade info gap activity to train 8th graders before their first 8th grade info gap in lesson 1.6.
• Several teachers talked about doing the first card together as a class, having a student or pair of students come up and be the teacher’s partner. Once the class agrees there is enough information, they all solve it. For the second card, they worked with their partner.
• Beth Pope Hill shared ”For 1.6, I laminated the info gap cards and gave the groups 2 different color dry erase markers so they could do the transformations on the card. I think that helped them move a little faster.”

 

Matt Parker reminds us that the Desmos Activity Transformation Golf is a great companion activity to provide extra practice at this point.

 

Lesson 1.7

The lesson synthesis brings out the question, ‘How can you look at two shapes and tell one is not the image of the other?” This is a question on the mid unit assessment, so take the time to bring this out.

In one classroom a teacher added this to their lesson summary (you could also have them take down as notes in the back of the book):

• If one shape IS the image of another, then all corresponding sides and angles will be equal.
• If two shapes DO NOT have all corresponding sides and angles equal, then one is not the image of the other.

Practice with a few shapes: “Could A be the image of B? Convince me.” Problem 1 and 3 in the practice exercises do this as well.

 

Lesson 1.8

Note the “Building towards” standard- understanding this is important for the final question of the end of unit assessment.  

Not much talk about this lesson on line yet, except this encouraging note from Kent Haines on twitter:

And one more piece of encouragement from Chrysty Hunt Clarkson in the 8th grade OUR/IM facebook group :