A quick note: for those reading How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, I will be posting the blog entry reviewing this book on Thursday, February 28. Feel free to comment on the post once it is up - I welcome your input.
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Last Friday I was fortunate enough to have the time, energy, and forethought to plan a lesson that went off swimmingly and I want to share its pros and cons here
My students have been honing their graphing, solving, and analyzing skills since returning from Winter Break. I noticed a severe lack of comfort in manipulating fractions as well, so I wanted them to be exposed to that as well. In order to bring it all together, I had the of idea of letting the students create graphs on graham crackers using icing. If you take a graham cracker and rotate in 45 degrees in either direction, the holes perfectly line up to create a grid. It was wonderful.
I explained it to my students exactly this way:
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Last Friday I was fortunate enough to have the time, energy, and forethought to plan a lesson that went off swimmingly and I want to share its pros and cons here
My students have been honing their graphing, solving, and analyzing skills since returning from Winter Break. I noticed a severe lack of comfort in manipulating fractions as well, so I wanted them to be exposed to that as well. In order to bring it all together, I had the of idea of letting the students create graphs on graham crackers using icing. If you take a graham cracker and rotate in 45 degrees in either direction, the holes perfectly line up to create a grid. It was wonderful.
I explained it to my students exactly this way:
Students were given three sets of systems of linear equations with increasing difficulty. They must start by graphing those in Level One and showing me the correct graph. If they had the correct graph, they could then create it using icing as you can see here. There were three problems in Level One and they could complete as many as they wanted.
Level Two consisted of systems involving fractional coefficients or negative numbers. They needed two graham crackers to create (an added incentive).
Level Three consisted of a system of linear inequalities involving shading (translation: more icing). It was quite difficult and only one student achieved it. Unfortunately, he had to go to his next class before graphing it on the graham crackers.
Level Two consisted of systems involving fractional coefficients or negative numbers. They needed two graham crackers to create (an added incentive).
Level Three consisted of a system of linear inequalities involving shading (translation: more icing). It was quite difficult and only one student achieved it. Unfortunately, he had to go to his next class before graphing it on the graham crackers.
I even allowed students to take photos of their work and tweet it using the hashtag #grahamgraphs. It was quite engaging.
Overall the activity was a great success - almost all students were working (even those who had previously given up). I was able to increase the skill of many and reinforce the need to come to tutoring for some. I would highly recommend using this lesson if you can in the future. Just be sure to share your own hashtag!
Overall the activity was a great success - almost all students were working (even those who had previously given up). I was able to increase the skill of many and reinforce the need to come to tutoring for some. I would highly recommend using this lesson if you can in the future. Just be sure to share your own hashtag!
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