- 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!)
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!