desmos

Is Lego Gender Biased?

by Jon Orr

Here was how our conversation in math class (MFM1P) went…..How many pieces make up this Star wars Lego ship? Screen Shot 2015-02-23 at 3.28.54 PMWe started with that picture and had a great conversation around Lego.

Then I showed this one.

Does the pool/hot tub have more pieces/less pieces/ or the same? This turned into “boy” Lego vs. “girl” Lego. My personal opinion is its all great…. My 3 daughters are just as excited to play with Yoda as they are with Disney princesses. Girls in the class agreed that they didn’t need their own line of lego!!!

I moved our conversation a little forward with asking Which costs more? And which should cost more?

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 5.46.05 AMAnswers: Continue reading →

The Power of Match My Graph

by Jon Orr

I was checking out twitter last week and ran into this from Dan Meyer:

— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) February 19, 2015

and I had a concept coming up that I have always had a tough reaction to. I threw it out there.

To get students to be interested in it I wanted them to be “dying” to figure it out.

I thought about putting them in a place where they had to struggle— I wanted to open up the middle!
Michael Fenton has a series of Match my Parabola challenges and I thought of those. I modified his challenges a bit to include those examples from my tweet.

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 9.58.19 AM

Click to access Desmos page

Continue reading →

Ready for round 2?

by Jon Orr

Second semester is starting tomorrow and I just wanted to get down my ideas on things I will be changing and things I will be keeping…..

New things…

I’ll be using the spreadsheet I modified from @alicekeeler. Although I plan on using Kyle Pearce’s further modified version.

I have slightly modified old my assessment approach (again). I’ll share later.

Kyle and I have been Tweeting back and forth all weekend about spiralling our grade 9 applied classes. We have been teaching using an inquiry based approach (4 part math lesson) and thought that spiralling would fit right in. We’ll keep you posted. Here is my day-to-day plan by topic and task, so far .

I’ll Continue….

a ton of stuff….but here are a few

Keeping my students curious.

Strengthening the connection between algebraic representations and graphical representations using Desmos! 

Documenting my class by taking a picture/tweet for every school day.

Warm ups – To start every class we do a warm up / starter. Most of these starters are math related but for me the most important part is that the starters allow our class to “Gel”. My buddy @Regan_bio is an advocate for always saying we should show our students that we are human and remember they are human too. Take the first 5 minutes of class and be a good human with your kids…..maybe they will be more ready to do some math!

Recently Mary Bourassa has shared her great list of daily warm ups for her grade 10 applied class. Check out her warm ups.

Here’s what we have been doing…

Monday’s – Estimation180 – As a class we complete one of these great challenges (10 minutes). We track our progress on Andrew’s / Michael Fenton’s provided handout.

Tuesday’s – Visual Patterns. I choose a pattern for us to determine the equation.

Wednesday’s – Pictionary – Our class is split into two teams. They take turns drawing and guessing objects, sayings, math ideas that I have picked out. Most of the time this is a non math game. (10 minutes)

Thursday’s – Throw Back Thursday — I choose a question / skill that my class has been exposed to in the past and we work on our whiteboards on this as a review question.

Friday’s – 20 Questions. — I pick something and the class has 20 yes or no questions to try and guess what I have picked. We then play a second round where the class together picks something and I try to guess. (10 minutes).

Have an exciting second semester everybody!