MEL3E – Day 10

by Jon Orr

Today’s warm up was a look back at some of last week’s ideas but with an open question spin on it. screen-shot-2016-09-19-at-12-43-59-pm

For warm ups students go to the vertical whiteboards or blackboard and work together. They are only allowed one marker. After a few minutes of work I yell out “switch marker”. They are supposed to pass the marker to their partner….and keep working together. Passing the marker keeps from one person writing all of the work and promotes discussion.

Most students completed a solution like the one below. They picked the hours worked…but started with $1000. Some groups chose their own hourly rate and built up the bi-weekly pay. A few groups had to adjust their hourly rates to keep the bi-weekly pay under $1000.

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We picked up where we left off on Friday and finished researching flights to San Francisco in about a half hour.

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For the remainder of class we talked about time zones. I displayed the World Clock from my iPad.

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I then presented them with some screen shots from my phone with some missing values. They had to determine the missing values on their desks.

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We ran out of time here…..so tomorrow we’ll work on the rest of the time zone/24 hour clock exercises and then start researching train and bus routes to San Francisco.

 

Energy Bites! – 3 Act Math

by Jon Orr

Today I made our go to snack…..peanut butter bites. My kids eat these up like crazy. I turned the making into a math task.

Act 1:

Ask for what they notice and what they wonder?

The intended question here is: How many energy bites will be made?

Have them guess. Too high…too low….best guess.

Ask for what information we would need.

Act 2:

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They may notice that the ball is not quite lined up right. How will the adjust?

and

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Is the bite a perfect sphere? Will a sphere be good enough? Give them the volume of a sphere formula. Let them work.

You students may notice the dimensions of the bowl…..or also may notice that its filled up to the 500ml mark. An interesting task will be to calculate the number of bites using either the volume using the dimensions or the volume using the measuring cup.

Act 3: The reveal

Possible sequel question:

What would be the diameter of the giant Peanut Butter Ball if all 22 were mashed together?

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And now for the recipe….as requested by Meg Craig!


Link

Updating the MFM1P Spiral

by Jon Orr

“Have you taught for 25 years? Or have you taught one year 25 times?”

I don’t think I’ve taught the same course the same way ever. Why would we? We don’t have the same kids in front of us. And especially with the resources at our finger tips from our colleagues inside and outside of our schools. I’ve wrote before about the power of #mtbos and it changes the way you teach.

I started spiralling the MFM1P course a few years ago with Kyle Pearce. Since then I’ve taught that course 3 or 4 semesters in row…..and never the same way. New amazing lessons and tools are springing up. For past lessons I wasn’t completely happy with I’ve got to see if this new lesson or that lesson will help my students understand the concepts more deeply.

One change I wanted to make was to include solving equations earlier in the course. In my old plan I waited to introduce it after introducing linear relations. But, after teaching solving equations using the Double Clothesline and the puzzle nature of learning it that way….I can introduce it now and continually practice our skills through warm ups.

If you want to follow along as my day-to-day plan unfolds follow this link! If any of you have been spiralling MFM1P I would love compare notes, or see your plans.

 

 

 

Road Trip – MEL3E Day 9

by Jon Orr

Today’s warm up we played the game of NIM. I started this off by saying “I’m the undisputed champion of Southern Ontario on the game we’re going to play. I’ll give $10 to any player who beats me!!” I put down the bill on the table!

Game of NIM in our classroom:

There are two players. There are 21 sticks in a pile. Players take turns. A player can choose to take 1 or 2 or 3 sticks from the pile. The player that takes the last sticks wins!

Easy enough game? My students thought so and were eager to win $10. I played 2 rounds each with a different student in front of the class. They couldn’t believe that I had won both times at such an easy game. I let them in on the secret so they could go off and play and win against their friends or parents.

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If you can leave your opponent with a multiple of 4 …you win….so with 21 sticks you can always win if you go first.

Next up we are switching strands to Travel and Transportation. I started with having them split their whiteboard down the middle. On one half they wrote “I notice”. On the other side they wrote the heading “I wonder”.

I showed this short clip and asked them to write down anything they noticed and anything they wondered.

I gave them 2-3 minutes to write down their noticings and wonderings. Next they had 2 minutes to share that with their partners. Then they shared with the group. At first they were pretty shy to share with the group….but once we got rolling…….they wondered a lot!!
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I explained that the “oh no” in the video was said because driving to SF looked super long! We had a great lengthy discussion about travelling by car. A few stories from me and also from them! The list of wonderings they generated will fuel our work for this part of the course! We will come back to driving costs and owning a vehicle costs next cycle…..this time around we’re going look at travelling by Air, Bus, Train. We’ll read schedules, learn about time zones, and read 24 hour clocks.

Today’s focus –and as it turns out Monday’s too– was on air flight. We broke out the iPads and looked up flights to SF. I handed out a recording sheet.

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Most students hadn’t searched sites like Expedia or Travelocity before so we went slowly. We’ll resume this activity on Monday and we may get to doing some problems with the World Clock and the 24 hour clock.

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2 weeks done! Happy Friday!