Days 1 -4: "Summer Assignment"

I have almost always posted a Calculus Summer Assignment on my school website. In the past I have pushed it on the Pre-Calc teachers to give to their students who are signing up for calculus next year. It sends the message that I’m not playing around and gives the kids an idea about which math skills are going to be important for the class. The assignment has also been useful for when teachers, parents or students have asked, “Do you think Johnny would be successful in calculus?” I hand them the assignment and tell them my answer depends on if Johnny can do at least 50-70% of it without help.

The assignment is what I spend the first four days of calculus doing (3 days reviewing and 1 day assessing), which (conveniently) also takes care of my lesson plans for the first four days. However when I hand it out to everybody on the first day, I change the name of it to FIRST ASSIGNMENT to make things fair and minimize complaining, but I make it clear there’s a quiz over it on the 4th day of class. The results of the quiz are most invaluable because I'll know who needs help before we even start with the good stuff!

Day 1-3: Summer Assignment

I assume no kid looked at or even got the summer assignment; it allows me to be pleasantly surprised by any student who comes in with problems already done or questions in their mind that they want to ask, lol.

There isn’t a single question on the assignment that is not important, and I know I need to go over all of it in the first 3 days of class. I still ask them where they want to start on it. I have stuff on there that I know they have never seen before that I will absolutely put on the quiz, so we better go over it! I also have a video on my website where I go over every problem (link included in product) just in case somebody is absent or needs to hear it again. Some of these kids have major gaps in their skills, but I know you already know that. Some things I made sure to discuss: factoring, synthetic or long division, log properties, using the unit circle, graphing of many different types of functions with some transformations, horizontal and vertical asymptotes, notations for intervals, slope, area (include trapezoids), volume, and the difference between a secant line and tangent line.

Day 4: Summer Assignment Quiz

Quiz day! Whether you decide to do a paper quiz or self-grading quiz, today is the day you’ll see who can handle the class and who is not quite ready at the current time. I’d go ahead and invite students who failed it to after school tutoring or create some modules for them to do to help fill in the gaps.