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  • Complete the Square for Vertex Form

    Complete the Square for Vertex Form

    This post provides a handout that guides students through the various steps for completing the square to transform an equation into vertex form. Students are guided through each step in isolation. Overview Students are presented each step in a separate chunk of the lesson. Then the steps are chained together, with scaffolding that is faded.…

  • Telling Time in 2nd Half Hour

    Telling Time in 2nd Half Hour

    When the minute hand passes 30 minutes and approaches a full hour, the hour hand gets closer to the next hour. This can be problematic for students. Many see the hour hand close to the next hour and think that is the hour. This post presents an approach to address this with students. At vs…

  • Time on an Analog Clock – a Chunked Approach

    Time on an Analog Clock – a Chunked Approach

    Telling time on an analog clock is challenging for many students, especially some with special needs. I worked with a middle school student with a disability one summer and after a few lessons he scored 100% over two days on telling time. Below shows the progression I used with him. I used a task analysis…

  • Piecewise Functions – Introduction

    Piecewise Functions – Introduction

    Here are images from a handout that serves as an introduction to piecewise functions. The focus is to develop conceptual understanding of piecewise before attempting to graph independently. The work is divided into chunks to reduce the level of task demand at a given time in the process. The first section has an application and…

  • Cutting Up the Math Into Bite-sized Pieces

    Cutting Up the Math Into Bite-sized Pieces

    When I train new math and special education teachers I explain that teaching math should be like feeding a hot dog to a baby in a high chair. Cut up the hot dog into bite-sized pieces. The baby will still consumer the entire hot dog. Same with math. Our students can consume the entire math…

  • Scaffolding Higher Level Math Topics

    The graph shown involves derivatives – a calculus level topic. Before getting into this heavier mathy stuff, consider the title of this post and the other content presented on this blog. Making math accessible to all students is not a special ed or a low level math thing. It is a learning thing. This artifact…

  • Chunking a Lesson

    Chunky peanut butter means you there are pieces or chunks of peanuts. The peanut butter is broken into distinct parts. Chunking in teaching means breaking a concept or lesson into distinct, smaller parts. This makes it easier for students to process the lesson and the concept. They focus on less content at one time which…