Thursday, November 20, 2014

IMP Math Day 38 - Finishing Fort Hall Businesses and POW Write-up

Today my 2nd and 3rd blocks finished up Fort Hall Businesses. The neat thing about these questions was that the starting points were not given. The students are given a couple of data points in the situation itself and one of the problems gives the rate of change but the second one doesn't. It is so rewarding to see the students work through these problems and figure them out. The odd thing is that my 2nd block class solved the problems using graphs and my 3rd block class mainly used In-Out tables or just reasoned through them.





#2 had to do with a movie theater selling tickets and it gave the amount in the cash register after 20 tickets were sold and then after 60 tickets were sold. This one gave my 2nd block alot of trouble (they didn't have as much time to work on it either) so I asked them how many points does it take to draw a line. I then had a coordinate plane that one of the groups had labeled but hadn't put a scale to it yet or graphed any points...they were frozen. I had talked with all of the groups doing #2 and we pulled out 2 ordered pairs from the information that was given so during the class discussion I showed them that one method of solving the problem would be to simply graph the ordered pairs and draw the line containing them. From this info we could answer the question of how much money was in the cash register to begin with. Then I guided them to find the amount of each ticket (slope) and we were able to write the rule for the graph. They are taking a quiz tomorrow on graphing and I can't wait to see how they do. I am anxious yet optimistic!


My 5th block took a quiz yesterday and I gave them feedback on their papers without assigning grades. Today I went over a similar assignment from the book (again) and then gave them their quizzes (with the feedback) back and told them to make corrections based on the feedback. Understanding variables is a difficult concept for 9th graders for some reason. I expect to have to offer a quiz retake but maybe I won't!

I read another encouraging POW Write-up today. An excerpt is below:

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