Will a Meteorite Hit Land or Water?

To finish out most of our probability unit, I wanted to do something fun & interactive. What better way to do this then have students toss around an inflatable globe for a few minutes! The goal for the day was to determine how often you could expect a meteorite to hit land versus water. Students tossed the ball and another student would catch it. They would look at their right thumb and record if it was land or water. The groups did this until the ball was tossed 100 times. The kids loved to see how close they could get to the expected value of 70% water and 30% land. We calculated the probabilities and also looked at how likely it was to hit North America by using the areas of the continents. What a great review of Geometry as well!

At the end of the activity, I asked students if they liked it and why. One student said he loved it just because he got to play ball for a few minutes, which was expected. However, some students were saying things like "I never knew I could use Math, Social Studies, and Science all at once!" and "Today was really fun because of the globes but I loved how real-world it was!" I have just started asking students for feedback after activities and I highly recommend it! They are honest and if students can't enjoy or engage in an activity, then why torture them with it?! This helps me know what to keep for next year and what things I could find or create something better for. 

Have you done something like this before in your classroom? I would love to hear about it!

Create-a-Station

We started this week by MAP testing, which make for long days for the students. To break up the testing, I wanted to do something as a review where students could create their own station. We do stations quite a bit, but they have never gotten the chance to create their own. Why did this idea take so long to come to mind? I don't know-- but it will definitely be something I use in the future. Students are engaged, they are going back and reviewing old material, and they are creating quality work for their peers to do. They love that students are actually going to do these stations, rather than just making them and moving on. They are excited to see if the other kids like what they are creating. 

Every time I allow students to create I am so overwhelmed-- in a good way. It amazes me what they are capable of creating. They are creative, ingenious, & they know exactly what other kids like to do. I gave them a rubric to keep them on track, as well as a group/peer evaluation to complete at the end to hold all kids accountable for participating and providing quality work. 

I love the way these projects are turning out. It's interesting seeing the things the students come up with and are interested in. Board games were the overwhelming creation made for this activity. 

Oreo Stacking Box-and-Whiskers

As a day-before-Spring Break activity, my math classes all did the Oreo Stacking activity, which I found here. Oh my goodness...this was one of the best activities we have done all year. Student buy-in was there, engagement was at an all-time high, AND they got to eat Oreos! The focus of this activity is on mean, median, and mode. When we got back from break, I wanted to find a way to extend this so we could use their data we had already found. I decided to have my students create box-and-whiskers based off the entire classes' data.  For their posters, I wanted them to make sure they had their data listed, the box-and-whisker plot created and labelled, and lastly, I wanted them to analyze their box-and-whisker plot to determine what it truly means in the sense of the Oreos. This was a knock-out project & I encourage you all to try the Oreo activity if you haven't already!

Once again, the Oreos weren't even there, but engagement was still extremely high because this data meant something to the students. This is so important and as I have progressed throughout the year I have realized just HOW important relevance really is in a classroom. Their math work turned out amazing & the posters they created look fantastic.

Do you want to do work you see no ownership or value in? Probably not. And even for the self-motivated, it's likely not going to be your best work. How can I create unrealistic situations for students that aren't important for them and still expect them to perform at the top? I've decided I can't. Let's stop giving students useless tasks and start creating experiences.