Here’s a lesson that worked for me recently. I had six logarithms questions posted around the room. I gave each pair of students some sticky notes and asked them to go around adding to the posters. Each answer had to be different, clearly. (I didn’t even specify that each answer had to be different, actually, the students just assumed that.)
I love that students were out of their seats and talking to each other. They were more energetic about these questions than they would have been about a worksheet. And they were automatically noticing generalisations as the activity went on and more answers got added to the posters. Also the group feel to an activity like this spurs lots of students to try creating an example that is a bit harder than they would suggest normally.
This was a good activity just like this, but I added a little more. Later in the lesson I took pictures of the posters with my iPad. They are set to automatically upload to iCloud, so I accessed them on my classroom computer and could show them on the screen. We talked about a couple of interesting sticky notes and students noted the ones they thought were incorrect. A few of my students like notetaking more than others, so they copied a few examples.
Since posting one of these pictures on twitter, I have been featured by another teaching blog: Resourceaholic. My idea is one of five “gems”; the other four are (also) amazing ideas!
I am glad that the sticky notes idea seems to work for others; a few others have tweeted to say they liked it. Thanks for the feedback, Emma Cox and MathSparkles! Here’s the file I used with the logarithms questions (make a copy to save it to your own Google Drive or download it); the questions are based on a resource by Susan Wall.
What worked for you recently?
