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I love this week because everything that I tried worked. All of these lessons have been works in progress for several years, but this year it all came together.
This time each group had their own function and cross-section shape and they were able to take the time building their volume and then they enjoyed sharing their final product with the class (plus seniors with Play-Dough). Later we went to the computer lab to work with software (WinPlot) that hopefully will help students better able to see the volumes we are calculating as it does a nice job with cross sections and volumes off revolution.
Other groups did rough estimations (a story is around 10 feet so our answers should be around 10 meters because it looks like it's 3 stories tall), made calculation and measurement errors and talked to each other to fine the error, and even one student climbed the stairs to the floor of the top balcony (I never say they couldn't) and directly measured the height of the wall.
I get to work with some amazing caring students and this week reinforced all the reasons why I love being a teacher.
Calculus
Students used play-dough to build 3D models of a concept we are working on.
This time each group had their own function and cross-section shape and they were able to take the time building their volume and then they enjoyed sharing their final product with the class (plus seniors with Play-Dough). Later we went to the computer lab to work with software (WinPlot) that hopefully will help students better able to see the volumes we are calculating as it does a nice job with cross sections and volumes off revolution.
Geometry
We've been reviewing proportional reasoning so we can get ready for trigonometry as a proportion. The past two days students have been applying various ways to indirectly measure the heights of walls (select the Geo 2014-03-27 file and go to the last 4 slides). What's new this time around is we started in the classroom with a known height and they could work to get their calculations to match an expected outcome. They were horrible! But they didn't quit and they worked to reduce their error. The result? When we when to measure a wall that we didn't know it's exact height, the kids just went to work. They were concerned with possible error, but we talked about places where things could go wrong with measurements and they worked harder to get accurate measurements. My favorite part of the day was watching a student with autism ask other students to be in his group. They all worked so well together. They helped each other measure, they helped keep everyone focused.Other groups did rough estimations (a story is around 10 feet so our answers should be around 10 meters because it looks like it's 3 stories tall), made calculation and measurement errors and talked to each other to fine the error, and even one student climbed the stairs to the floor of the top balcony (I never say they couldn't) and directly measured the height of the wall.
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| There he is right at the edge! |
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