Month: May 2014

Famous Mathematicians Choice Board (Differentiation Idea)

A few years ago I made a project that I used with my year 7 (eleven year old) students. I introduced it by talking for about two minutes about Blaise Pascal, a mathematician I find personally interesting.

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Then I told my students they were going to choose a mathematician to learn about and it would be their choice how to show their learning. There are nine options for them to produce, and they needed to do three of them which form a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal line from the choice board. (Here is the choice board file.)

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I arranged the nine items so that the lines require some diversity of products. The two times I have used this project my students have responded very positively to the choices. The second time I did it, after they had made their three items, I made larger groups of those who had chosen the same mathematicians to put together a display board of their work. It’s a bonus for me that this project makes for a lot of good display work if you need/want to change your classroom displays.

I think if I did this project again, I might allow more choice on the person as well, perhaps by adding the option, “Choose another mathematician of your choice and have it approved by Mrs A”.

I am posting about this today because I was reading Mr Bigger’s post about differentiation using choice boards. It also makes me think that I should try to use a choice board for a more “meaty” mathematical topic. Has anyone done this before and have an example to share?

 

Lesson: Ferris Wheel Exam-Style Question

Sometimes I just want to remind myself and others that not every lesson has to be “special” or involve a game or video. Lessons that are successful are those where students learn to think better and experience mathematics at work. Here is one of those; it’s not flashy, just solidly successful.

It is time to review our work on trigonometric functions in my grade 11 class (IB Mathematics SL year 1). I made this document with an exam-style question closely modelled on recent exams. The question is about a Ferris wheel rotating at a constant rate.

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The first page is the question, which I copied onto half sheets and gave out. These instructions were on the board.

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I told my students to try to work in exam-style conditions for the first step, promising that under the black box on the slide there were other steps we were going to go through with this question. Then when it seemed like everyone had time to attack all the parts of the question, I moved the black box on the slide to reveal the next set of instructions. Students worked in pairs to create their best answers.

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And finally, I gave out the mark scheme (the second page in the document) and we moved the answer papers around so every pair marked answers from someone else.

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We then returned each student’s paper and they got to glue their corrected answer and the mark scheme into their notes.

This lesson mirrors the discussion idea called Think-Pair-Share and provides good exam practice. Students appreciate getting to see the mark scheme and how it applies to a their own and another’s answers.

My lessons are like this a lot of the time. I would say I teach a whizz-bang-special-game-or-video lesson once a week, or less when I’m tired. But I always try to get students talking, working together, and going deep into mathematics.

How much of the time do you teach whizz-bang-special lessons?