Math Journals - LOVING Them!!!

I'm LOVING my math journals this year.  We've only done 3 entries so far, but I've had so much fun with each one.  I'm going to use foldables a lot this year in our journals (the students are really enjoying this) - and have used two already.  I know I've already posted some pics of our math journals, but I plan on doing one blog post each week about what we've included.  And Sunday seems to be a great day to do this.  So here goes ...

We have started decorating our covers with magazine letters.  I thought we'd be done decorating them by now, but with our Spirit Day and Terry Fox Run, time got away from us this week.  I plan to give the students time to finish decorating their journals this week.  We made a table of contents on the first page (front and back) for the students to use as a reference.

Our first entry was a foldable for Operations.  This isn't our first math unit, but I thought it would make a great first journal entry because everything we do is related to operations.

To make this one we made a square, then folded each corner into the middle.

Inside this foldable we included the definition for each answer word - example:  "Sum" is the answer to an addition question.  We also included a sample solved problem.

This was a great beginning of the year review.

Patterning is actually our first math unit (we call them strands).  We used this foldable to review the two types of pattern rules:  recursive and explicit.

To make this foldable we folded our rectangular sheet in uneven thirds - the smallest third was this little lip at the bottom (called a matchbox fold) that we folded up at the bottom.  Cut the top third in half.  (Wow - this is hard to explain - good thing I'm including the pictures).

Underneath the flaps we wrote the definition and an example for the two types of pattern rules we study.

I'm really encouraging the use of colour in our journals - I want students to "make it their own", and this is one way to do so.

The last entry of the week wasn't related to our patterning unit, but I wanted to include it in our journals because it was such a large part of our Oreo Day.  We used the stacking totals from each student to find the mean, mode, median, and range from our data.

I really wanted to include a foldable, but we ran out of time (the story of my life last week).  We will study mean, mode, median, and range again this year in our Data Management strand, so I'll do one then.





I'm already thinking about ideas for new foldables next week.  I've never been so excited about a math journal before.  ;)

Happy Sunday!!!