Problem of the Day

This year I have decided to take a twist on my problem of the day activity.  Every period I give students their own problem of the day for when they walk into my classroom.  Student answer the problem that is either related to a prerequisite skill needed for the day's lesson, or it has to do with reviewing the problem from yesterday.  As students are turning them in, I am slowly making small groups based on right, wrong, or other (small mistakes).  I then can reteach in small groups as other students are working on iPads (ixl or khan).

Last year I noticed most students would be intrinsically motivated to get the problem of the day correct.  However, I noticed there were a few students in one period who didn't care so much about putting their best effort towards solving this problem.  I was able to talk with a few teachers about ways to help those students find a purpose for the problem each day, and we decided to start using the correct slips as a raffle ticket.  Every month I have decided to pull a ticket from my raffle bin for some type of reward.  One of the teachers I worked with made these little blue sheets of paper for our students to use for the problem, and I thought it added a nice tough for our raffle.  

So far students seem to be excited about it, but I will let you know exactly how this works out once we have a raffle.

Daily 5

When my students come into my room.  They know to do the Daily 5.

1.)  Take out homework, write night's homework assignment in school planner

2.) Load netbook (they take forevvvvvver to load)

3.) Write objective as the title of their notes with date.  ex. SWBAT (Students will be able to) add integers

4.) Problem of the Day (PoD)- They turn this into my box. I look over their answers and if majority of students need help.  I reteach to whole group.  If only a few students need help, I pull small groups. 

5.) Khan Academy Playlist- I have created playlists listing skills students need to master by a certain date.  They usually have 3 weeks to master a list of 7-10 skills.   As students are working on Khan, I am able to pull the small groups to go over PoD.

My board above shows the problem of the day is IXL and Khan.  I usually have a specific problem that we are working on.  However the only picture of my board is from a day we did Khan as the problem of the day.  Sometimes I will do this when I know exactly which students need my help on a skill from data collected the day before.  In this instance, I gave a checkpoint and wanted more time with 5 students.  Therefore, the other students were working on this same skill but at a more advanced level online.