Starting in with TPT and a Freebie!

This is somewhat unconventional for a Made 4 Math Monday post, but I'm going to go with it since I've been working on it for over two hours and it's now Tuesday, not Monday!  

I've been lurking around Teachers Pay Teachers for the past few months, thanks mainly to Pinterest.  It's an interesting concept, and in the age of Common Core, I think it will gain even more followers as we're all in the transition to new curriculum and are looking for new lessons.

I decided to take the plunge and post something there in my "store."  EDIT (7/30/13): TPT really isn't for me.  You can read my reasons here and also download the file I describe below.  I'm going to continue posting files for free here on my blog for the foreseeable future. I'm not hoping to get rich off of it (ha!), but I'm just trying it out as an experiment of sorts.  There are already lots of files I've posted here for free and my box.com account says they've all had hundreds of downloads.  Perhaps for something that's a little more lengthy, I can make a dollar or two to put towards classroom supplies! My dream- earning enough to purchase an iPad (in 2020 when they're obsolete, probably)!

So, you can visit my store here!

My first item is a family of functions scrapbook I created for my students this year so they could keep track of all of the parent functions we learned in Common Core Algebra I.  Since I teach 8th grade, I talked it up as a great resource for high school courses and I stressed how important it was for them to keep it up to date so that they could be used in high school.  My students enjoyed completing the books and always asked if they could fill in a page as soon as we learned a new kind of function.  It's a bit of copying, but in my classroom, it made a difference because my students were able to find their notes on functions and compare two or more parent functions quickly.  The facing pages held examples of transformations on parent functions, so they could see how a number in the function would influence the graph.  I noticed throughout the year that my students were becoming more independent at completing the pages and that they would think about domain, range, end behavior, intervals of increase, minima, and the like before I asked about them because they knew that those questions would come up in the scrapbook.     

There's also a freebie in my store, so be sure to head over and download it!

Thanks for stopping by! 

Do you have any suggestions regarding TPT?

Mathematically yours,
Miss B