Hello All!
Just a quick note to provide some updates on practices, tournaments and worksheets.
Equations worksheets were turned in by the students on Monday. For the most part, I was very pleased with the time and effort the students put into the worksheets. I told the students at practice that I think that these worksheets might be the single hardest thing we do in AG, so I was very proud of their work. Most students turned in worksheets. Over half the students got ten or more sheets completed with at least a third of the students getting the maximum number of points. I will check off points for the students and return the worksheets Monday next week. I would encourage kids to keep working on the worksheets if they didn't complete all of them, and to save the worksheets to study from for future tournaments. I have posted the answer key for the worksheets in the right sidebar so that each student can check their own answers.
I have also posted the On-Sets worksheets on the right. These worksheets are considerably easier than the Equations worksheets, I believe, and there are fewer of them. Any student can get up to ten points for completing these worksheets, and they are due before winter break (our last practice is December 20). Although we won't spend as much time in practice working on these worksheets as we did with the EQ worksheets, I would still encourage every kid to print them out and bring them to each practice.
Our mini-Presidents tournaments are going well. As many of you may know, on Fridays after our cube game tournament, we have been reading five Presidents questions, keeping score for everyone, and tracking the average Presidents score for each grade. As you might guess, the eight graders have the highest overall average, but the 7th graders have been closing the gap, and the sixth graders have been as improving as well. To improve Presidents scores, I would recommend every student find a good book about the Presidents, or a good digital source of information, and spend at least 10-15 minutes per day reading and / or studying that material. You can find good, cheap Presidents books at most bookstores (they still have those?), or on Amazon. There are a host of Presidential trivia apps you can get for either an IPhone or an Android based phone. And you can find Presidents quizzes on the national Academic Games website (agloa.org). I will also post some Presidents worksheets that can be used as study guides a little later in the year.
Finally, we have begun learning our fourth game, Linguishtik. A game that tests students' vocabulary, and their knowledge of English grammar, many students struggle with the game when we first learn it because those are subjects that aren't taught very much in school. I told them to imagine what it would have been like to learn Equations with knowing how to subtract or multiply. I told them not to get discouraged, and to make sure they take good notes when they are learning. I will post some Linguishtik worksheets which contain a lot of lessons within them sometime before next Monday. Those worksheets will not be due until after we return from break in January.
So much for this being a quick note (!) Hope you are all having a good Thanksgiving break - eat lots of turkey (or tofurky if you prefer), watch some parades or some football, and maybe study some Pres ;-)
