One of my favourite 3 act math tasks is Super Mario from Nora Oswald. I’ll be teaching it a few times this semester and here is our plan….
Act 1: Show the video…
engagement
Spiralling grade 9 applied math
So, I’m going to spiral the grade 9 applied course! I’m a little hesitant because I’ve taught this course with a units approach for the last 10 years. But I’m also exited!!! It seems so awesome that everyday we will solve problems; Alex Overwijk says
“learn to uncover curriculum instead of cover curriculum“
@mjfenton “learn to uncover curriculum instead of cover curriculum” #slowmathchat
— Alex Overwijk (@AlexOverwijk) February 4, 2015
Instead of “boring up” the first day with paper and expectations, and policy, etc, etc we talked about being curious, collaborative, creative, and embracing challenge!
So….we dove right in to this.
Act 1: Showed this:
Document your days! 180 Photos
Since the first day of school I have been documenting my days one picture/tweet at a time. On Sept. 2, 2014 I decided that I
Day 1 – Math is Like….
would take one picture of something (fun or boring) going on in my classroom each day and upload it here. Now that the semester is over I wanted to reflect on this process.
The simple idea of me just taking a picture keeps me on my toes. It keeps me organized. It keeps me saying “Everyday we should do something great” It keeps me working towards a better learning experience. I’m the one who’s looking over my shoulder!
It started with pictures….but I quickly realized that once I take a picture I could send it to Twitter! This was great because it allowed me to write something quick about the day and saved server space on my website. And with Twitter’s ability to embed a tweet……this became a quick copy and paste routine.
It’s such an easy addition to your teaching and so powerful. Do it now!
Here is my page of pictures/tweets
Action shot from Commit & Crumple http://t.co/Yv9Z4FhmlH #mtbos #mathchat #blurry pic.twitter.com/7fpb5N4FMF
— Jon Orr (@MrOrr_geek) January 21, 2015
Logarithmic Warm Up
Our goal in Advanced Functions today was to graph y = log(x) and transformations of y = log(x). Here was what we did as a warm up/minds-on. Everyone started with a whiteboard and a device of some sort (Smart
phones, iPads, tablets—I have access to a set of iPads for anyone without a device. This class being a grade 12 class….just about everyone has their own device).
I had them log into a PearDeck file I created.
I gave everyone in my class a number. Some got integers 1-20 and some got fractions 1/4 through 1.
My instructions:
1. Take your number, n, and find log(n). Write your number and log(n) as an ordered pair! (n, log(n))
I started the PearDeck presentation which showed them this slide……and gave them all a movable point.
2. Move your point to the location of the ordered pair you have! So my students started moving their points around and on the projector screen we can see everyone’s points all at once in real time! So we are basically watching the creation of y = log(x).
Sorry for the poor quality of pic…it was on the fly
You could see the looks on their faces as the graph was being created….pretty cool
From here we took a note on the properties of the function….then kept using PearDeck to analyze transformations of y = log(x). We saw Graphs then –> wrote equations and then saw equations –> drew graphs. We could do everything right in PearDeck so we could see all of our answers all of the time! PearDeck works through your Google account…..give it a try!
