Author: Jon Orr

Random Winner Game – MEL3E Day 6

by Jon Orr

I’ve decided to spread some skills (expectations) around as warm ups. Today our warm up involved pay schedules.screen-shot-2016-09-13-at-11-52-17-am

They highlighted every two weeks on their sheet to indicate pay days…..and seeing which months had 3 payments allowed us to have a short discussion on making budgets around our pay cheques.

We picked up where we left off from yesterday’s practice sheet with percent. We talked again about different ways to get paid, including an example of getting paid by commission. I brought in the random winner game to give a little more excitement to just practicing. I usually use the Smartboard and sticky notes but this always ends up with a huge waste of expensive stickies. This time I re-used the 100 grid from the Explain Everything file from yesterday.


 I assigned each person a colour (I only have 13 students—-otherwise assign each pair a colour). Each time they get their question checked by me and it’s correct they earn a tile. If it’s incorrect give them some feedback and ask to try again. WHEN correct they go to the iPad and randomly choose one of the squares to cover. At the end of class we randomly chose one of the squares….and whoever is covering that square is the winner!

Now since we’re dealing with teenagers…..this excited some of my students and for others……not so much. Although one student didn’t want to place any tiles on the grid she still had all her answers checked by me for feedback.

Tomorrow will be our first mastery day. We’ll spend the day working on skills from the week plus a quiz.

Grab the Explain Everything File 

Percent Pile Up – MEL3E Day 5

by Jon Orr

Today I wanted to see what my class’s prior knowledge was around percent. Since they are 16-17 year olds they have been exposed to percent quite a lot. But since their math skills are operating anywhere between a grade 5 level through to a grade 9 level I wanted us all on the same page.

I started off with an Explain Everything file I put together. The slides start at a basic level but then creates a need to determine equivalent values that match a certain percentage.

Slide 1:

Getting the explain everything file onto each students iPad, or getting them connected to the wifi, or showing them how to type in a URL can take some time…..so slide 1 is an easy intro that students who are waiting can work on.

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Slide 2,3,4

I wanted to make sure that when we know the whole is 100 that just counting the tiles covered gives us the percentage. These were too easy for my students but it gave us some time to review writing a fraction as a decimal and as a percent. I asked students to tell me the percentage they covered and then we converted to a decimal and fraction. They had the option to record what they were thinking.

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Slide 5,6,7

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Right away almost all students covered 10 squares. I then asked them to convert their new fraction (10/50) into a decimal to see if we get 0.1 ….and then some shock on their faces appeared. Some students then knew their mistake and made some corrections. But we spent some time here going over the visual interpretation …..10% means that 10/100 are covered. This board had been cut in half so only 5 must be 10%.

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Slide 8-12

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This is where we generated a need for an algebraic (proportion) method. The students could estimate how tall he could be….but they had a hard time determining with accuracy how tall he would be. So this is where I stepped in and showed them how to calculate. The remaining slides with Fido and then with piles of gold and then finally with no visuals at all were to practice this method.

After all slides were finished they started on some more practice questions on paper. We’ll finish those tomorrow as most students just started it.

Grab a copy of the Explain Everything project file

MEL3E – Day 4

by Jon Orr

Oh man…. I was so glad it was a tad cooler today. Much more comfortable to work and think in! Today’s warm up is a Which One Doesn’t Belong

Every student picked the bottom right. Some reasons were

  • It doesn’t have a 5
  • It has a line over top of it
  • It doesn’t look right
  • Only one with a 3.

and another…

 

“0.3 does not belong because it is not a quarter number”

This student was seeing money….each of the other 3 were values associated with quarters!! Nice.

I asked them to turn to their partners and come up with reasons why each of the others might not fit. I find that this group will not volunteer yet to say something out loud very often…..but if I ask them to tell their partner first, they will……then it’s like the flood gates open and they feel more confident to speak in front of the group.

We grabbed our whiteboards and I asked them to think of a hourly rate of pay that they would be happy with. I asked them to determine their annual pay. I flashed on the screen one of the pay schedules …..then asked them to determine their gross pay per period. We repeated this with different pay schedules and hourly rates.

We then switched gears and started with annual earnings….and determined gross pay for a paycheque…..then hourly rate!

I drew this image on chart paper to help with seeing the relationship between pay schedules (I need some more artistic talent).

We jumped back to the activity from yesterday….and kept working on it. For those students that finished I handed out this practice sheet Mishaal Surti shared with me. There were some students that still had confusions on finding rates, gross pay, and annual earnings but the beauty of spiralling allows me to save that knowledge and use it to inform my next move…and use it later in the course. We’ll come back to this task again next cycle when we discuss net pay, deductions, etc.

Next day…..We’re going to do some basic percent work.

Day to day 

 

 

MEL3E – Day 3

by Jon Orr

I was so pumped for today’s lesson other than the fact that it was 30+ degrees in my classroom. We all sweated together!

Again we started with a Would You Rather  problem…this time with earnings.

Most students started with the hourly rate and calculated correctly on their whiteboard the weekly wage. They needed a bit of help going from weekly to annually. A few students took the opposite route of dividing the $30000 up into weeks then hours!

I took up both solutions on the board as they would become useful for the next activity.

We had a brief talk on gross pay, net pay, deductions, and payment frequency. I handed out the first page of the Pay schedule matching activity.

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Click the picture to download the Word file

Students were to sort the pay frequencies based on most pays a year to least and paste onto the tracking sheet.

We took this up together and then I created a hard copy of the frequencies on chart paper to post on the wall.

They distributed the job titles among the schedules in any way they liked. There was one job title left blank so they could create their own title. Once this was pasted on the master tracking sheet they had to distribute the hourly rates of pay and annual earning among the jobs….now each student had unique problems to work with. Their task was to fill in the remaining spaces–the gross pay per period and either the annual earning or hourly rate.

What I found was most students could find their hourly rate when given the annual earning as long as the job title listed the hours worked in a week. There was lots of struggling all around with finding the hourly rate any where else. I could see some confusion with calculating gross pay in almost all cases. As a group they did not complete all of this activity and we’ll pick it up again tomorrow.

If I had to run this again I think I’d modify the slips so that first there was all hourly rates and no annual earnings….which would keep the calculation moving forward in time. Then I would give a second activity on another day with only annual earnings and ask for gross pay.

My goal was to dive right in and work through confusion and struggles as they come up. I think we’re there….now to work with the confusion and struggles!!

As for tomorrow I’ll start with some problems involving calculating gross pay from annual earnings and then come back to this task.

Day to day