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 

MEL3E – Day 2

by Jon Orr

Today’s warm up was from Would You Rather.

Student first took “gut check” guesses and they were split evenly on the two choices. I asked if they noticed anything else about the images and they said the weights were given. In pairs they were to work on their whiteboards and show their thinking with some mathematical evidence to help make a more informed decision. Most groups divided 1.5 oz right away by two to get 0.75 oz each. Also, most groups needed a little help with dividing the 7 oz by 8 people instead of 7. We stopped and had a chance to review the rules of rounding and when we should round to 1, 2, 3, or more decimal places.

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Since Purchasing Power is a strand from the curriculum document I wanted to continue with making buying decisions. We followed the Is Lego Gender Biased lesson. It’s a fun lesson that asks students to choose the best deal but throws a little twist in.

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Calculating the price per piece was a great way for us to practice unit rates with purpose and it gave us great talking points again with rounding.

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After the shocking conclusion that “girl marketed” Lego cost more per piece than “boy marketed” Lego the students worked on this problem with ease:

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Tomorrow we’ll look at ways to get paid and schedules: Weekly, monthly, annually, etc. I’ll throw in a few best buy practice questions too.

Follow the course day-to-day as it unfolds. 

 

It begins! [Day 1]

by Jon Orr

So….let’s do this! Day 1 is done!

This semester I’m teaching grade 9 applied period 1, MEL3E (grade 11 workplace) period 2, and MHF4U (Advanced Functions) period 3. I haven’t decided yet which course yet to blog about consistently, but I’m planning on picking either MEL3E or MHF4U; which would you like to read about more? I will be spiralling both of these courses for the first time and I’m pretty excited about it. Here’s how day 1 looked:

MHF4U

After grabbing a playing card to determine who their partner and where their seat would be… I did a 5 min talk on my strong beliefs around curiosity, growth and team work we did a couple activities — No talk on course outline, marks, or rules:
Activity 1: Math is Like…. 

I ask students to fill in the statement “Math is like…” I love the variety of statements that come out of this. Backgrounds and experiences play a huge part and they shine here. I have them read their statement to their partner and then take volunteers to read to the big group! I also read some of the grade 9 responses out loud to the seniors….which they find hilarious!

Activity 2: Graph Your Subjects

I saw this tweet a few weeks ago from Jen McAleer.


Here are a few of our pictures:

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Activity 3: Pyramid of Pennies
I showed them the Pyramid of Pennies 3-act math problem from Dan Meyer. They wrote noticings and wonderings.

Then using the vertical non-permanent surfaces (VNPS) around the room they worked on solving the problem of How much money is that?

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After taking this problem up and discussing that a they’ll be working together vertically to solve problems daily I assigned some review questions for homework.

You can follow my day to day on this spread sheet which I’ll update as we go through the course.

MEL3E

This class ran through the same activities as MHF4U except for some minor differences: In activity 2 they did a warm up graph with placing Dad, Daughter, and Granny on Height vs. age graph. We reviewed what a point would look like for a baby, and for Michael Jordan. After getting the hang of placing points on the graph they graphed their subjects just like the grade 12s.

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In activity 3 they noticed and wondered about the Pennies. They made estimates on too high, too low for the number of pennies. I then revealed the answer.
You can follow my day to day on that course here.

Which would you rather read about in the future? The grade 11 workplace? or the grade 12 advanced functions? Help me make a decision!