A Year is....

A Year is 3 1/2 cans (38.5 oz.) of hairspray.

A Year is 89,725 laughs.

A Year is 54,750 Text Messages.

A Year is 204,840 Steps at School.

A Year is 5.2 x 10^2 Hours of Grey's Anatomy.

A Year is 45,120,000 seconds spent with Ms. Roitz learning Algebra!

A Year is 162,000 Algebra Problems.



Another fun project that I used from Mary Beth Runyon and Lynn Smith from King Phillip Middle School. I started off 2012 by having students select an everyday activity and extrapolating it out for the entire year using a unique measure. I hung the student posters throughout the school. It was fun seeing students from all the grades stopping at individual posters and checking them out...(I think they got a big kick out of my 10 yards of wrinkle cream that I use annually!) Just another fun way to use math to learn a little bit more about your students. I found out a lot about time my students spent doing chores, gaming, homework, and more!

Candy Guess

I got the idea for this activity from two teachers, Mary Beth Runyun and Lynn Smith, who presented at the NCTM Regional Math Conference in St. Louis this fall. It is simple to do and takes little planning and gives a nice review of math vocabulary and number sense. I hung one of those big plastic candy canes full of candy that you can find at the store and put up the first clue..."Win this candy cane when you can guess this 3 digit number." I didn't make any big announcement about the activity- just waited to see if my algebra students would notice and ask questions on their own- and they did! I explained the only rule that I had for the contest was that they would only get one guess which they needed to write down on a piece of paper and turn in to me. Each day I added another clue getting more specific each day, i.e. Composite number, multiple of 5, an integer, etc. I knew they were hooked when I noticed two of my algebra students checking out the bulletin board for the next clues as soon as the bus dropped them off at school- before they were supposed to even be in the hallways in the morning! Several students had sheets with possible numbers that they would cross off each day after viewing the new clue. I have to admit I was pretty amazed. I was not sure that 8th grade students would care all that much about winning candy. Yesterday a student guessed the correct number, -645. They weren't expecting the number to be negative! Around 75% of my students had turned in a guess before the end of the contest. The best part of the activity was seeing them argue with each other about the possible solutions to the contest- using their math vocabulary.

First Snowfall of the Year

I have been waiting for our first snowfall ever since the first day of school. Instructor Magazine had shared a "get to know you" activity for the first day of school having students write down five things about themselves and then wadding up the paper and having a snowball fight with classmates. When the fight was concluded, students could open up the snowball they ended up with and read five things about one of their classmates...getting to know each other a little bit better. I loved the idea- but not for the first day of school. I decided then that I would save the activity for the first snowfall of the year. We are currently working on systems of equations, so as a warm-up activity I had students put their name on a clean sheet of paper along with a couple of systems of equations for a friend to solve from a certain page in their Algebra Books. When the students completed this I told them how much I loved snowball fights and that we were going to have one right in the classroom. Their eyes lit up right away. I shared the rules- 3 chances to throw a "snowball" at a friend. After their third throw they were to pick up a snowball close by and sit down and then solve their systems of equations. How many times does a teacher hear, "That was fun. Let's do that again!"? The best part of all (besides the smiles on their faces) was the fun practice we had doing our math...and I didn't mind tossing a few snowballs myself!

Mix-It-Up

National Mix-It-Up at Lunch Day is tomorrow. My school's Student Advisory Council has a fun activity planned for how to separate up the tables and students tomorrow. We had an activity earlier this month about labeling and name-calling and how these labels stay with us for a long time and for many of us for the rest of our lives. Tomorrow we will be using labels of empowerment to separate our students- giving them labels such as "smart", "hard-worker", "friend", etc. to match up with corresponding labels at the tables and hopefully meet some new people at lunch. Keeping with the mix-it-up theme and in preparation for tomorrow, I had my students get up and move around a bit in math class today. We are working on finding slope between two ordered pairs using the Slope Formula. I had each student write down their favorite ordered pair on a whiteboard and pair up with various students around the room, finding the slope between their two ordered pairs. The nice part about this activity was that it was somewhat self-checking. Partners should have gotten the same answer- so if they didn't, they knew that one of them had made a mistake and they could look things over and make corrections together. It is always fun to shake things up and move around a bit- especially in math class!

Proportions

Send your students to the grocery store with their parents to do a little more investigating on their own using proportions to find the unit price of items they purchase. What is the price per hot dog bun? If you could purchase just the amount of hot dog buns that you needed for your family, what would that cost? Extend the activity to include more food items such as cookies, pop tarts, instant oatmeal or hot chocolate...the list goes on. How would the total amount you spend on your groceries differ if you were allowed to purchase just the amount you needed to feed your family? Give students some time to process their information for sharing with the class. Encourage them to share their results in creative ways such as Glogster, Blabberize, or Juxio. Both students and their families will have fun with their discoveries on this trip to the grocery store!

Knovio

Want to spice up a powerpoint for your math class? Knovio might be something you want to check out. Knovio is a free site that allows you to turn your powerpoints into video presentations. Simply upload your powerpoint and then record yourself as you narrate your class through the powerpoint presentation. If your computer has a Web camera you will have a video of yourself to the side of the powerpoint. while the powerpoint lesson progresses. I shared this site on my Technology blog but thought I should share it here as well because there are all sorts of possibilities for this in the math classroom. I created a video using a powerpoint and Knovio and left it for a substitute to use for my classes one afternoon. You could also upload your video to a blog or class website- really nice for kids that are absent to watch on their own and catch up. Not a whole lot of extra work involved and my students liked it.

To Blog or Not to Blog

This year school seems busier than ever. I have a great group of students and they come to class with positive attitudes ready to learn. They seem to enjoy class and the activities I plan to reinforce my math lessons. I am still trying out new things. As far as technology goes, I find myself spending more time working on the technology that is available to the pupils and teachers in my district such as Moodle  as well as supporting the other teachers in my district with their learning. At the end of the day I go home happy. I walk my dog, go to my yoga class and catch up on the news of the day. I have not made the time to blog like I have in the past. I have been beginning to question whether blogging is a good use of my time- if I should move on to other things, Then this week I decided to check out some blogs I follow that I haven't taken the time to check out in a while and I remembered why I fell in love with blogging in the first place. Miss Calculate had a great post about algebra writing prompts. Dy/Dan is still at it with a great post on the shower vs. bath. I am enjoying reading  Old Math Dog Learning New Tricks. My creative juices are flowing and my fellow bloggers are the reason why. A fellow teacher at my school asked me last week where I had gotten the idea I was using that day for practicing function notation. We were "playing" a survivor type activity. Students were divided into groups of four and worked on problems together as a team. When they all agreed to an answer they would have me come by to check their work. If they had the correct answer they could erase one of another teams' "treasures". The team left at the end with the most treasures won a prize. Students had so much fun trying to take out other teams- creating alliances. One class even worked it out at the end to have everyone win. Luckily I had enough pencils, pennies and stickers! The amount of work and review the students were doing in their survivor teams was amazing- but the most amazing thing of all was the amount of fun the students had learning/practicing their function notation skills. I guess this is why I really blog. To learn and be inspired by other bloggers as well as to share what goes on in my classroom... and to get my creative juices flowing!