At the beginning of each year I always have the best of plans, however, we never seem to get through everything that I planned. I always forget that everything we do goes a little bit slower at the beginning of the year. Where do we turn this in at Mrs Strole? Where does this go in our binder Mrs Strole? What’s the job of the secretary in group work, Mrs Strole? However, taking the time at the beginning of the year to stop and answer all these questions in detail, making sure students understand their responsibilities and my expectations is worth it in the long run.
Fast forward to our first group investigation. I had planned on this taking one period. However, I quickly realized that the groups weren’t understanding my expectations nor their roles in group work. So we slowed down, we explained what each person’s job title is, what that role entails, and what are the expectations for group investigations. Twenty minutes later, the groups were on track and everything was running smoothly. However, it meant that what I had planned for the second day was going to be pushed to the third day. Then I started to question myself, is this investigation really worthy of two full days.
However, I was quickly reminded that anytime the students can “see” the math come to life for the first time it is worth it. Two days later was back to school night and I had parents come up to me afterwards and say, “I’m not sure how you have done it, but my kid has gone from math being their least favorite subject every year to it being their favorite subject this year.” Another parent said, “my child never tells me about anything they do at school, but as soon as I got home they couldn’t stop talking about how they got to go outside for math class today and that their group didn’t pay attention to the data and that their legs were so sore from all of the squats that they ended up doing.” So was that lesson really worth two periods, instead of one? In my opinion, yes it was. I laid the groundwork for what group work expectations are, I got student buy in, by getting them excited about math from week one.
When The Activity Not Only Helps Them See But Feel The Math
I wanted to find an activity that would tie into my first Monday Mathpic, get the kids outside, and help them to realize that integers play a role in their life, not just in math class. So I searched the various websites that are my go to places and found an activity called About Time. Our Monday Mathpic looked at the trends in 911 calls made with cell phones vs landlines from 2006 to 2018. This activity started with the kids watching the first iphone commercial. It then asked them to look at how humans have been making technological innovations throughout history – in communication, in travel, and in warfare. Over time, advancements from one milestone to the next have come more and more quickly. In the activity we modeled “before zero” years using negative integers. We then decided what an appropriate interval would be for our data set. Groups that didn’t choose wisely felt it in their legs by the end of the activity because they ended up doing quite a few squats. For example one group had to make a number line in the parking lot that spanned from 300,000BC to 2012. They decided that they wanted to go every 1,000 years as their interval. I asked them multiple times if that was an interval that they really wanted to use. They repeatedly said yes, so I told them to use it. About halfway through their number line the group called me over saying how sore their legs were. I said, I can only image… you are having to do lots of up downs to draw and write in the years. At that exact moment, I saw the light bulbs go off, “so that’s why you kept asking us about our interval selection? Next time we make a number line we are going to pay attention to the data more closely.” We then ordered and positioned the milestone innovations on our number line. Finally we found the difference between the integers and saw why we keep change change on subtraction. I was hoping that the students would see a connection, actually feeling a connection was an added bonus!
#seeingmath with Mrs Strole 