We are quickly approaching the end of the 2022-2023 school year and many of us are starting to get our teaching assignments for next year. If you are here, it is likely that you have been selected as the teacher for the all-new AP Precalculus course.
While we are sure that many of you have lots of years of experience teaching Precalculus (and probably Calculus!), we all know that any time we are teaching a new course, there is tons of work to be done to prepare. Which Precalculus lessons can also be used in AP Precalculus? How should the assessments be adjusted to prepare students for the AP Exam? What additional resources should we provide for students who need extra support?
We have been working hard to try and help you answer all of these important questions. We hope that by sharing the following resources, you can make a solid plan that will help you feel confident to start teaching the course in the fall. Here are our suggestions:
Daily Lesson Plans
Calc Medic now has a FULL curriculum of lessons for every topic of the AP Precalculus course! Every lesson is designed with the Experience First, Formalize Later (EFFL) model for teaching, where students work in small groups to think and reason through an activity before the teacher facilitates a whole-class debrief consolidating student strategies and layering on more formal vocabulary, notation, and generalized formulas. All these editable lessons are ready to be printed, and teacher answer keys and teaching tips are provided for every lesson.
Homework, Quizzes, and Tests
Don't stress! We have created homework, quizzes, and tests that are perfectly aligned to the Calc Medic AP Precalculus curriculum. This means that every lesson has a homework assignment, and every quiz and test listed in our pacing guide is available as well. This means you’ll have everything you need to assess student learning for this brand-new course.
These resources are now available for purchase through the Math Medic Assessment Platform! NOTE: You will need to use your existing Math Medic account or create a new Math Medic account in order to get access.
Extra Support for Students
When students struggle with a new lesson, we like to have resources available to share with them to help fill in the gaps. We are planning on using the College Board AP Daily videos as this resource. AP Daily videos are short, on-demand videos led by experienced AP teachers (including “Sarah from Calc Medic”) that cover all the course content and skills. This resource can be accessed in your AP Classroom account starting July 1, 2023. Calc Medic is creating guided notes for students to fill out as they watch each video.
AP Exam Review
Many of you have used the Calc Medic AP Exam Review Course to help your students prepare for the AP Calculus exam. We will be creating a similar course to help students get ready for the AP Precalculus exam for 2024. Plan on much of the same format, including short content videos, multiple choice and free response practice questions, strategy videos, and a full-length practice exam.
What About a Textbook?
The College Board has recommended that teachers can use their existing Precalculus textbook. At our school, we had already ditched the textbook altogether in Precalculus and we don’t see any reason to bring one back. The new AP Precalculus course has several content items that are not contained in our old book (regression, semi-log plots, concavity, selecting function models, among others), but more importantly, Calc Medic resources provide all the benefits that a textbook would traditionally provide.
More Questions?
We highly recommend that you join the Calc Medic AP Precalculus Facebook group, where we have a community of 3000+ teachers that are always willing to collaborate and share ideas. Let’s help each other to make this a great course! We are really looking forward to seeing all of these new resources in action in classrooms next year.
