I’m away from my class today for our first AEAC (Achieving Excellence in Applied Courses) meeting. Our Math department will meet regularly to try to address and fill an urgent student need. More to come later.
Today my class will be with a substitute teacher. The’ll start with completing the warm up from Agree or Disagree Math:
Then they’ll finish working on their Two Truths & One Lie banking research.
If a student finishes early they are to work on their FreshGrade mastery questions.
The warm up today was a two truths and a lie. I showed this picture and gave these three statements: 
With their partner and at their vertical surface they were to identify which statements were true and which one was the lie. Most groups completed the unit rate first discovering that it was true that each piece was about $0.18. For many groups I had to re-visit that 40% off meant that you had to subtract $30.80 from the original price….many groups immediately assumed the new price was $30.80. I find this a common mistake! Anyone have success avoiding this mistake? I would love to hear about it. 
Most students didn’t understand what the last statement meant. I found myself using my hands to demonstrate removing 40% of something…..What percent would be left? YES 60%!! I used this idea to show that we can calculate the new sales price using 60% instead of using 40% and then subtracting.
We are moving into the Saving & Borrowing strand today and I wanted to compare banking options. I put up this image and asked “What do you notice”
We spent about 15 minutes talking about the different things they noticed about the image, which bank accounts they had, and which banks those accounts were at. We finished that talk guessing what the Monthly FEE would be for this account. One student said it had to cost more than a $1 and less than a million! Many students admitted they had a hard time guessing. This concept was completely foreign. Many had not looked at their own bank statements.
We spent the remainder of the class comparing chequing and savings accounts from the different banks. I continued the Two Truths and One Lie idea into this activity.
For each bank they scanned the QR code — which brought them to the web page that showed the banks accounts options. From there they had to research which statements were true and which one was false for that bank. I found that when they discovered the lie they knew immediately that the other statements were true. I asked them to verify that they were indeed true and they didn’t mind doing that. Next time I think I’ll adjust this to not always have only one lie. Only a few students finished the front side of the page. All will have to finish the back of the page tomorrow:
On the back they had to visit one of the two banks listed and create two truths and one lie. I’m going to have them trade with a partner and verify which are true and which was the lie.
Happy Monday!
Our warm up today was a jump over to our Savings strand. In that strand we’ll talk about banking options, advantages, disadvantages of cheques. One skill that I’ll throw in for warm ups is cheque writing. The students had a copy of this in the warm up booklet. I left it all open for them to fill in while I walked around and observed what they already knew about cheques and writing them. Which wasn’t a whole lot. I stepped in after a few minutes to fill the cheque out on my iPad and Apple Tv. We talked and made notes all about the different sections of the cheque.
After this we played Monopoly!
The game offers some practice making change and money decisions. I added a new rule with a red die. Every time you make a purchase or have to pay money to another player you have to roll the red die. If you roll a 1 or 2 you have to pay 13% sales tax (HST). If you roll a 3 or 4 then you pay nothing extra. If you roll a 5 or 6 you receive a 20% discount. We rounded all values to the nearest dollar.
We played for the entire class. Students had their whiteboards and calculators with them to do any calculations needed. Today we only had 11 kids….so all 11 played on the one board. If I had anymore I would have set up a second game. With 11, no one made it completely around the board in our 1 class. Next time I would have broken them up into smaller groups.
While we played I put on the following playlist from Spotify! I heard groans and complaints about the 80s music. I said “If you purchase property then you got to choose a new song for the group to listen to”. This sparked a few kids up.
We took pictures of how much money and what properties they had….so next time we played (maybe next week) we can pick up where we left off.
Warm up today was from again Would You Rather Math.
We looked up how many litres were in a gallon from Google. They went to the boards to finish off their choice. Some coaching was needed with most groups to decide how to use the conversion. I found myself using my hands to show why multiplication makes sense if we are converting the litres to gallons. I put up my hand to say
“I’m holding 1 gallon…how many litres is this? Now here in my other hand I have two gallons…how many litres?”
“Mr. Orr, that’s too much now. We only want to 1.85 gallons.”
“Ok, say i had 1.5 gallons?”
“I’d multiply by 1.5″ ….”so I should multiply by 1.85!!”
And for some groups who were converting the litres to gallons I also demonstrated using my hands. I pretended I had cups that held 3.785L and scooped some water out of the 5.62L bucket….how many times can I do this? The students seemed to grasp that they would divide here!
For the remainder of class we revisited our trip to San Francisco. We looked at travelling by bus and travelling by train. Students filled out the sheet researching websites like Greyhound, Amtrak, and Google Maps.
