A Positive Post

With so many negative posts this week, I thought I should put up a positive one to balance things out a bit.

Even though the week started out rough, it has become much better as the days went on. I did end up teaching the same lessons to both classes this week. I did this because Monday's attendance was so low in practical math that I didn't want to have to reteach all the definitions the absent kids would have missed. But then the kids were having so much fun with the first activity that I thought it was only fair to let them finish the other activities I had planned for Algebra, even though they were in Practical Math.

We did experiments all week this week. We started off on Monday with a bouncing tennis balls experiment. We continued on Tuesday with Barbie Bungee Jumping and finished on Wednesday with a time/distance experiment where we went to the gym and measured our walking speeds.

(Thanks to the Illuminations website of NCTM, I had these great lessons. Here are the links:
http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?id=L246
http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?id=L646
http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?id=L254

I love this site. It seems like all of my best lessons come from here.)

So Monday we bounced tennis balls and counted the bounces and graphed our data. Then we played a game on the SMART Board that was a huge hit. (Found here: http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/MazeGame/ ) I couldn't even believe how much the kids liked that game and it was so simple.

Barbie Bungee Tuesday was a huge success. When I first saw this lesson I was a little wary of it and wondered if it would even be possible to implement it in my classroom. But it worked and it not only worked, the kids had a lot of fun. Again, we graphed our data and analyzed it.

And on Wednesday, the walking experiment was great - not only for the math involved in the graphing but in the exercise we managed to get that day! The kids had a lot of fun comparing their speeds with other kids speeds too.

Even though it was a good week, I find myself quite exhausted at the end of it. These lessons are great fun and I love doing stuff like this, but it really does take a lot out of you.

I'm just grateful my classes are so small.