Day 6: Circumference and Area of Christmas Baubles

Posting every day? Who's stupid idea was this?

Lucky I am vaguely prepared. Here's one from my first year of Maths teaching:

I'm sure this is a theme which could be expanded on too, but in it's current form at least we have a nice worksheet, some actual measurement in the topic of measurement, and another pretty thing to colour and put on the wall.

Have a good weekend everyone! I'm off to another Katoomba High Girls Night.

Classroom decoration updates and open-ended questions

I made a wall decal! Actually, I made a fabric first, then a decal. Spoonflower is awesome. I wish I could wallpaper my classroom, then I would make loads of awesome maths wallpapers. But this will have to do. Inspired by the pencil creature from Donald-in-Mathmagic-Land.

Our faculty recently bought some books on open-ended questions in Maths and I've been using the ideas a lot teaching measurement to year 7. My favourite activities so far involve perimeter and area of letters.

The first one begins by showing a letter drawn on cm grid paper. Telling the kids that the diagonal is approximately 1.4cm, we work out the perimeter of the letter. Then the challenge - write your name on cm grid paper with a perimeter between 98cm and 102cm. This was awfully fun.

It was great to have a project that involved a bit of planning, but lots of checking, trial-and-error, and editing. And looks cool on the wall!

I did one too. As you can see, I'm not shy about working out, unlike a lot of the kids!

Then we looked at area. We tried to make letters with an area of ten square centimetres.

I haven't been posting much, but this weekend I'm starting something special for the end of school year! It's going to be fun.

BINGO!

I love bingo. It seems to me that students do more drill questions playing bingo than they are willing to do in any other format, and don't care in the slightest that all they are doing is repetitive drill questions.

I know that as a classroom activity it is not exactly Quality Teaching, there is no deep conceptual understanding or exploration or critical thinking, but I like to think of it as a more engaging alternative to textbook work. I don't care for textbooks, especially in the junior years.

I used excel to randomly generate sheets, which means answers will sometimes be repeated. Usually I let them cross off multiples all at once, since I won't ask two questions with the same answer.

I generally write one question at a time and then every 10 or so go through the answers with the class so they can check if they missed any and to discuss method as we solve them. In some classes kids shout out a lot so this works well. With others I have found it works better to write up a few questions at a time then wander around helping people during the time everyone takes to find the answers. Obviously it depends how hard the questions are too.

All of my Bingo files are in this folder, and it contains the following items:

• Algebra Bingo (a, b and ab terms), and some questions.
• Algebra Bingo (with binomial answers in a, b, and constants), and some questions.
• Algebra Bingo Multiplication and Division (ab, ac, bc, and abc terms)
• Area Bingo (answers in centimetres squared) (Designed to work well as easy answers to square, rectangle, parallelogram, kite, rhombus, triangle questions), and some questions.
• Fractions Bingo (Good for simplifying, ok for multiplication and division too, or a mix, could also do "What fraction is x of y?" questions), and some questions.
• Indices Bingo (I used for the index laws for multiplication, division and power of a power), and some questions.
• Surds Bingo (Good for simplifying, adding and subtracting..?)
• Ratio Bingo (I used questions on simplifying ratios), and some questions.
• Also my colleagues and a class created a great powerpoint of student-written questions for area bingo as part of their year 7 area unit.

I've also used other versions where I've just given the students a range of values to choose from and had them draw their own grid. It's much easier as long as the values are simple (e.g. numbers from -10 to 10) and avoids repetitions. I've also given them a number plane to draw some points on and rolled two dice to randomly generate points.