Week 2

My Favorite Things:

Favorite Geometry Activities: Too Much Trash. Guess I am a proportional reasoning kick. "If everyone in Windsor lined up their recycled papers for a year it would reach 249, 289 miles! That is 4,000 miles shy of the Earth to the Moon!" Says Casey M. a ninth grader in my Geometry class that took the amount of paper his family uses in a day, and extrapolated the data based on Windsor, California. *Just found out cannot link to document on Blogger, so just message me for copy of project and Rubric. 

Off the Quadrilateral Island: This is a simple little sort we did with Quadrilaterals. I gave groups of 3-4 students one line of this hand-out: (Not mine, got it from Google, can't find my original source, does anyone recognize it?


The directions are for students to use the proper marks to show your assumptions about each figure in their row. Then decide which quadrilateral doesn't belong and explain why. The product is a poster that explains the attributes of the survivors and why the quadrilateral they choose was kicked off the island. We did a gallery walk. The students only got 20 minutes to decide, plan and make the poster. 

Favorite Ice Breakers:
From Dinner Party Download Podcast: The hosts, Chuck and Josh, ask all their guests two questions: What question are you tired of being asked and what is something that we don't know about you. 
Another is: Uncommon Commonalities. In a group of 3-4 (preferably 4), one student, say the oldest, draws a pair of concentric circles. 
Have students divide up outer ring with the number of students in group. Each person has to find something unique about him/herself to put in outer ring. In the center ring, they have to find something they have in common, can't be about school, the town they live in, or gender. Some pretty interesting facts come up. My favorite was a group of two boys and two girls, where all had at least two pierces in their ears. You get unique allergies, folks who play instruments, black belts, people who were born in other countries, all kinds of cool people tricks. 

Favorite Places to Get Insight:
Twitter: #MTBoS
Desmos
Geogebra
Wolfram Alpha

Favorite New Source for Mathematical Thinking:

http://songlyricsinchartform.tumblr.com/

If you teach any kind of proportional thinking, you have to check this site out! 

Example:

Love!