Last week during our PD my students worked on graphing stories on pg. 42-47. I really had fun teaching graphing stories earlier in the year. After going over a few of the videos on graphingstories.com I had my students complete some graphing stories worksheets that Lori White shared with me at AMSTI training this year. The graphs were the same as some I have used previous years but she had places for them to explain why one choice was correct and the other 3 were wrong. This approach gave us the opportunity to discuss the details of every single graph. THEN (my favorite part) we checked out the Ipads and we went outside to let them film their own graphing stories. The majority of them did some kind of flip or cartwheel. In those cases I had them to graph the relationship between the distance of their feet off the ground and time. The coolest one was one where 3 students were standing on a 2 foot wall and one student stayed on the wall and the other 2 flipped at different times. Then one jumped back on the wall and then back down to the ground. We graphed all three on the same coordinate plane in different colors. I think the students had almost as much fun as I did. I wish I would have made some of them bounce a ball and film it. One group did drop a pencil. This was a VERY fun activity. When the students finished graphing I played the video and we critiqued the graph as a class. This activity helped us to set the tone of "Mistakes are okay in here. Let's just learn how to correct them!"
Okay...back to the IMP curriculum...I made the graphing stories assignment for them to do while I was in PD because they should have been able to understand how to do them after the extensive time I have already spent teaching it (prior to using our new books).
Today I gave my students close to 30 minutes to continue working on the Haybaler POW. The one question I have kept asking my students is whether or not any 2 bales can have the same weight. Today, after encouraging them to just start testing values, I had one person in each of my 2 classes to realize that none of the hay bales could have the same weight because there are no 2 sums that are the same. I thought they would NEVER come to that on their own! I have also now had a couple of groups to come up with a solution.
The Search for Dry Trails really does not take long to go over. The students came up with their answers fairly quickly and we had a discussion and went over the definitions for mean and median. I ended up giving them additional time on Haybaler because we finished "The Search" so quickly.
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