project

Day 21: Tin Man!

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The Tin Men have arrived! This activity was awesome! I couldn’t believe how well it worked. It took a total of about 4 hours and 90% of the students were working that entire time. I used pretty much all of Elissa Miller’s Tin Man stuff. The reflection was homework so I will be reading that tomorrow. I only had six groups in summer school but 4/6 groups got the surface area right (I gave all groups a 5% error because I know the sphere and cone are difficult to wrap) and the other two got more aluminum foil after a point deduction on the project, but they weren’t that far off. One group also needed more time, but finished it after the end of class. It was tough to get to the start of similarity after this – next time I would try to have it all on one day.

J’ai dormi avant de publier ce message. Je me suis fatiguée, je suppose…

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Day 20: Volume and Surface Area (and Tin Men)

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Today was mostly review on Surface Area and Volume. We did Deal or No Deal review again and I got much better investment from the students than last time. I was just going to do it for an hour but it ended up going another half an hour because the kids just wanted to continue.

After their test, we got started on the Tin Man Project. So far they’re really into it. I was so surprised by how many cardboard objects we got! I meant to take a picture of them all before the students got to them. I was worried since I was really the only one that had brought anything in until today. I didn’t think to send out an all-staff email to see if other teachers could bring in stuff but it turned out fine! Here’s some of their work so far and they will hopefully finish tomorrow:

Il y a encore beaucoup de travail à faire pour ce projet.

Day 19: Volume and Spheres

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I love the surface area and volume unit and like Lisa Bejarano, I just wish there was more time for all the cool projects out there! I already had a couple that I knew I would do, but coming across Lisa’s blog post opened up so many more that all seem so awesome. It was hard to choose what to pick. But I decided on doing many 3 Act Tasks – the File Cabinet yesterday, and then today I did Dan Meyer’s You Pour, I Choose and Meatballs. I worked them in the same way that I did the File Cabinet yesterday, so they take a long time, but students are engaged, curious, and working the whole time. I had a bunch of other activities cued up from Lisa’s list but I will have to see if there is maybe time at the end of the semester during final review. I will be doing Elissa Miller’s Tin Man Surface Area Project next class now that we’ve talked about surface area of spheres. I’m very excited to see how that goes!

Funny asides:

  • Apparently when I said “sphere”, a good chunk of the class thought I said “spear”. So they were preparing themselves for “working with spears tomorrow”…
  • I got comments from the class about how I know a lot of guy math teachers that are in my videos. I showed two male teachers, and not my videos. But high schoolers can think what they want…
  • Before doing the Meatballs task, I told them about how I was a terrible cook and always run into problems when I try to cook a real meal. I said that the next video is something I still haven’t learned from and run into this problem too often. Had them guess what kind of problems I could run into making spaghetti and meatballs with marinara sauce. The guesses were hilarious and the cooking stories that came from it were even better.

J’aime que mes étudiants ont un sens de l’humour, même avec un cours d’été.

Day 17: Area Projects and Geometric Probability

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Today was very free-form. They took a quiz at the beginning, learned about geometric probability, and then had free time to work for almost two hours. During that time, I expected them to work on one of the two projects I gave and/or study for their test, which will be at the start of the day tomorrow. The two projects are attached below and involve finding the area of a lawn to be fertilized and the area of a house to be painted. I like the house painting one better because it asks some more higher-level thinking questions (but not that high-level) at the end, but many of my students have done it before if they are taking my class for grade replacement so I decided to find another one.

A note about geometric probability – I find this topic so interesting! I guess I wished I taught more about probability and statistics, but I haven’t been able to yet. It’s a short section in this unit and I don’t really have time to go deeper into it, but I had the idea today that I should bring in a dart board and actually calculate out the geometric probability of landing in certain places. It would make it much more real, but I just have to find a dart board. Good thing I have another whole year before I might be teaching it again…

Projects:

Je me suis rendue compte de la folie de mes étudiants quand je les donne le temps libre, mais c’est la folie productive.

Day 16: Wheel of Theodorus and More Area

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The Wheels of Theodorus turned out great! I actually only had about half that turned them in today all complete. The other half asked for more time to make their wheels more artsy and creative. I couldn’t say no to that! I’ve realized that I maybe needed to walk the class through drawing the first few triangles so that they saw the whole point of the 1-unit and the direction it has to go, especially with the overlap. Some were thoroughly confused, but I am still seeing good products in the end. I have the pictures of the ones that were turned in and will add more tomorrow when I get the rest.


The rest of the day was pretty boring. Go over new vocab about regular polygons and circles, practice with some examples, more challenging practice, class discussion, blah blah blah. I am missing my word wall, but in the short time span that my students have with the vocab, I’m not sure it would be all that useful. Tomorrow we will do another area project before taking our unit test.

La créativité dans les maths est vraiment source de joie pour moi.