After an amazing first week of school, it was time to start getting ready for our math units. Today, we got our notebooks ready and took a pre-assessment for our first unit: Operations with Rational Numbers.
In our notebooks, we began our Table of Contents and added in a section for the Math Practice Standards and Math Talk (ways we can start good math discussions.) We also glued in a plicker card for easy multiple choice checks.
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We started today with another number talk and video. This video is my favorite because it's all about how mistakes are good! It's important in my classes that students feel comfortable sharing answers and not being afraid be being wrong. Learning from our mistakes is important and allows our brains to grow. You can watch the video here. Next we did an activity called growing shapes. This activity allows students to look at patters and how they build on one another. Being able to see and understand patterns is one of the Mathematics Practice standards and is integral in being able to solve problems as well as building a strong foundation for algebraic thinking. First, I asked the students to think about how they see this pattern growing: We talked discussed as a class and I drew a representation of how the saw the pattern growing on the board. The kids found it interesting to visualize each other's ideas. There were lots of "oh's" and "I didn't think about it that way's". Finally, I had the students work as a group to use colors to represent the different ways our class saw the pattern growing. Being able to visualize and describe patterns is critical to algebraic skills they will learn later. Eventually, students will be able to see patterns and represent them using graphs and equations. Depending on how much time was left, some of the classes were asked to explain what the 100th case would look like. Aside from the fact that it would be "really big!" they determined that there would be 201 tiles along the bottom and it would be 101 tiles high. We started off our day today with our first Number Talk. Number talks are when I put a problem up on the board that the students are asked to solve mentally. After the students have had a minute or 2 to think about the answer, we discuss their strategies for solving it. We will continue doing number talks throughout the entire year to help students with their number sense and mental math strategies. Today's number talk problem was 12 x 8. There were some of the strategies from one class: After our number talks, we watched another video about learning math. You can watch the video here. We finished class with an activity called Paper Folding. The purpose of this activity is to get students to start thinking about how they can make convincing arguments. Here were their instructions:
The students found this activity challenging, yet fun. They really struggled with number 3. They kept coming up with a congruent triangle, just folded a different way! We talked about how you could fold something in to fourths by folding it in half and then half again. Then, the students started playing around with how they could fold the square in to halves differently.
Today I gave the students the opportunity to finish the Four 4's problem from yesterday. My plan was to give them about half the class to finish and share, but they were working so hard on it I decided to let it run through the entire class period.
I like to write my date as a math problem that needs to be solved, so today I wrote the date as August 4!+2. This introduced or reminded the students of the idea of factorials which are helpful in solving the Four 4's problem. After they had a chance to work in groups to get as many numbers as possible, I gave each group a piece of blank paper or poster paper (the posters started taking too much time, so I switched to blank paper after the first class.) The groups write their solutions down and posted them around the room. I then had the students do a gallery walk, where they got to check 10 problems. They put a star next to it if they agreed with the solution, or they wrote a comment on a sticky note if they disagreed. Finally, students got to look back over their poster and correct any mistakes that were found. I had to laugh a few times as I was walking around at some of the things I overhead students say. My two favorites were: "This is hard! My brain is growing!" and "Of course it's going to be hard, it's math. We just have to think." We started class watching a video all about brain research and how we learn. The big ideas the students got from it were:
1. Everyone can learn math! 2. The brain is a muscle. It can grow and shrink as we use or don't use it. 3. The deeper we think, the more our brain grows. 4. Whether or not we are a math person is determined by our experiences and beliefs. You can watch the video here Next we had a discussion about what we like and don't like people to say and do while working in groups. The kids came up with some great ideas and I compiled them on to posters that we will use as our group norms throughout the rest of the year. Finally, we put our newly compiled norms in to practice by working on the Four 4's problem. The challenge is to create the numbers 1-4 using exactly four 4's and any operations. The students came up with possible operations that can be used, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponents and square rooting. I was impressed with how many students came up with the knowledge of square roots as that standard shows up in 8th grade! An example of one of the solutions is 4*4+4/4 = 17 I love this challenge because it gets kids thinking deeply about numbers as well as reviews what they have learned about order of operations in previous years. Most classes only had about 5 minutes to work on this problem, so I'll give them more time to work on it tomorrow. Today was the first day of school and an early release day. After all the teacher training I did over the summer, I'm super excited for this year to start! I had the students create note cards with the following information on it, just so I can get to know them better:
1. Name 2. Something special or unique about them. 3. How they feel about math 4. What are they most looking forward to this year (in school) On the back, they were to choose 4 numbers that tell something about them. For example, my numbers were: 4 ⅓ 602 36.25 54,000 First, I gave the kids a chance to guess what these numbers meant. I love hearing these guesses! One of my favorites is that I have $54,000 in my bank account. :) After they've had a chance to guess, I give them the answers and let them match which answers go with which number. My age. The amount of time in a day I am asleep. The area code of my cell phone number. Approximately the number of miles on my car. The number of people who live in my home. I love hearing all the "oh"'s and "ah"s as they figure it out! With whatever time is left, I allow the kids to come up and share their numbers. |
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June 2016
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