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Armpit Cream, and How it Turned Out!

5/9/2011

4 Comments

 
So I jumped into WCYDWT head first.  Had an idea tried it out, and man did I learn a bunch (I am not sure yet about the kids).  Highlights of the whole experience are as follows:
  • The students who were engaged were engaged to the greatest extent that I have seen in my class (in my math class at least, science usually does the trick no matter how boring I am).
  • Some students wanted to keep working on it even after I had to move on.
  • The answer became the reward to most kids!
  • There was never a point where I felt like the lesson was dragging.


The difficulties were:
  • Students who still simply did not want to try.
  • Students that had nothing to show for the time we spent on this.
  • Giving just enough information to push them forward.
  • Connecting the lesson goal with the actual activity (students stretched their mathematical muscle, but did they learn about balancing equations, well no we ran out of time).

To walk you through what I did I will give you the rest of my lesson in pieces.  First of was the Prezi I created.  

It was really just a vessel for some of the rest of the lesson, but I hope you enjoy my design.  We had previously talked about how equations needed to be kept on balance, like a scale (hence the design in my prezi.  I ended off with using a virtual manipulative and some text book (I am sorry, but I am just learning this!)
As you can see I just jumped into the question.  I told my students I was shopping online, and asked them where they shop online.  Then I turned my projector on so they could see where I shopped, they recognized Amazon, and some laughter and inquisitive looks appeared.  I passed around our class iPod (and my iPhone), for them to send some questions in (they like the online polls), and if that was taking too much time, I let them come write it up on the board.  Take a look at the questions they came up with.
Build television sms voting polls at Poll Everywhere
The main question seemed to be "Why does it cost so much money?"  A student on the board asked how many tubes did I buy, and that was where I knew I had it.  I gave away a little bit of the price, because students didn't believe I actually found this on Amazon, so I searched it so it got them doing Math even quicker (which now that I think about it is a silly thing to complain about, if they want to go with it, they should).  I told them that unless they got an EXACT answer, they must have been off.  Decimals came in, and I told them maybe they need a bit more information.  This is where my lovely information cards came in.
As they started getting closer, and closer, I would give them these information sheets, that would tell either the cost of the products, or the cost of the shipping, never both.  I had them for 1, 2, and 3 tubes.  I would give them one shipping cost, let them try to figure it out, and then give them the second (shipping on amazon is a base rate plus $1.25, students figured that out rather quickly when they got the sheets, I was very pleased that their knowledge of linear relations was still there).  It was all great fun, and many students, that would normally cut out, kept on going with only a slight bit of prodding, or encouragement (you almost have it!), except for a minority.

Then I started realising I was running out of time.  This had taken almost an hour, I loved that it flew by, but I had important "Mathwork" to do!  This is where I am stuck.  I do not know if I can actually direct this now to balancing equations.  They didn't have to write down a single variable.  I told kids who had finished to write a general equation, and they did so with flying colours, but other than that I just didn't know what to do.

I have more things to write, but this has already gone too long!
4 Comments
Colin Graham link
5/9/2011 07:54:12 am

It's great to see such detailed analysis of lessons, especially when they don't turn out as we wanted... I'm sure all of us have been there at some time or another, and the act of writing down things almost as they happened, especially when they are new to us, is not what many of us do as much as we should. Welcome to blogging, I'll look forward to seeing some more of your posts!
Colin

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Timon link
5/9/2011 08:08:34 am

Thanks Colin. The more I think about the more I am happy with it. I want to learn how to direct it more, but I realised (since I am a French teacher as well), it is like learning a language. I can read all about it, and not know how to do it. Now that I have immersed myself, I can already feel my questions getting better, and the help that I give is more instructional, rather than confusing or just giving the answer! I am pretty excited to be a teacher right now!

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David Wees link
5/9/2011 11:29:30 am

I have found that "how can we solve this same problem but much faster" is sometimes a good hook into the math curriculum you want to cover.

Try and keep track of the math skills they do pick up, introduce "useful" math skills they might need to solve these problems.

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Mary
5/9/2011 01:45:07 pm

This topic is one that can be very tricky because there are many big ideas lurking in background. It sounds like given the context, the students were solving more like an undoing process, which can be more intuitive than balancing. To make this simple say you have 4x +10=50...that is, you tell them you bought 4 creams and shipping was $10 with the total cost being 50. Take 50-10 to get the 40 spent on the product and divide by 4. This type of equation is pretty accessible using undoing. They also could have used guess and check...clearly a favorite in my twenty years of teaching, by students. In fact, I still use guess and check. I would venture to say that this situation doesn't really create the need for balancing. Although after reading your post again, maybe I am missing exactly how it was set up. The trick is to create an equation where undoing or guess and check simply is a pain. What did the student work look like? Could you tell how the students were thinking it through? It is a challenge to get a problem to match the big math idea you would like to come across.

Oh, and you may want to see how well the students understand the equal sign. I find even in high school they will answer 9+8= __ +5 with a 17 in the blank. Many students inadvertently pick up that "=" means do the problem.

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