Saturday 6 February 2016

Week #4 My Lesson


Starter:

My grade 9 applied math class went something like this on Friday:
A number of students remembered the song from Sesame Street and I'm hoping they all understood the concept. One student was a being a smartass, so I ran with it, and we checked each of the plates to make sure that there was only one with 3 cookies.

Next, I put this up on the board, and asked "Which One Doesn't Belong?"

Almost instantly someone said "They grey one," but right away someone else argues "It could be the hexagon too," and the discussion begins. I have the students explain to me why each one of the shapes doesn't belong, and when their logic was flawed, another student was pointing it out before I had to. The obtuse triangle was the most challenging, but they figured out a reason that they could agree on: exactly one obtuse angle.

To set them up to try this task independently, I had them fold a blank paper into fourths, and asked them to reason why each one of the following doesn’t belong.
They worked on them for a few minutes, and then we took them up together, and I focused on reinforcing the appropriate language eg: increasing, negative, direct, origin, quadrant, intercept, etc. I'm looking forward to using these for our math starter as we move from linear relations into algebra, and then into measurement & geometry.
*Next class I think we will try Desmos' Polygraph:Lines to further build their vocabulary.

Activity #1:

- login to save your progress
- create your own and challenge someone else
After they were all connected and had a chance to explore, we went through an example on the board to highlight the various features: weight, balance, pencil, and success. Initially, I thought they would have been ready to move on sooner from the SolveMe Mobiles, but for those that found it easy, they were eager to jump ahead to harder levels, and create their own massive challenges. I let them run with it, and instead of moving on to the next activity I decided to save it for another day.
*Students needed the whole URL to access the site on the iPad, if you left off /Mobiles they weren't able to connect by pressing play.

Closer:

This was not in my original lesson plan, however when a student suggested we should play Kahoot, I said "Sounds great." I had planned on closing with a problem in honour of 100s day for the last 10 minutes of class...but I'm flexible. Many of the students remember bringing in things like cheerios, and stickers when they were in the primary grades, yet they hadn't done anything in recent years. While they were playing with Mobiles, I found a suitable Kahoot for us to play that was all about 100. It was a fun way to wrap up class on Friday, and a couple of the questions were quite challenging.
*This year I have been using Knowledgehook Gameshows in math class rather than Kahoot because A: They have premade questions that match my curriculum, and B: The scoring is better since it emphasizes accuracy over speed.