Ms. Stewart's Webpage » math

And They’re Off!

stewartn — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:15:41 +0000

This school year is off to a fast start. Already we a juggling multiple assignments from English, science, social studies and math. We have been feverishly reviewing strategies for reading expository text and discussing ways to improve our writing. We've already had several assessments in math. As we review our daily assignments, we are working to learn how to juggle multiple tasks and responsibilities.

My advice to students: Put on your running shoes and try to keep up! It's much easier to keep the pace running with the pack than to make up ground once you have fallen behind.

If you need help figuring out how to keep up with the work load, see me or one of your other teachers. We can help.

Studying Circles in a Peace Garden

stewartn — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:52:30 +0000

Yesterday Mr. Bryden, our head custodian, came into my first period math class with a real problem. He had a bag of fertilizer and he was looking out the window at the peace garden planted in the lawn below. He was trying to determine how many bags of fertilizer he would need to fertilize the garden three times a year. Now, a peace garden is, of course, a circle (and we know how to calculate the area of a circle), but this circle has walkways cut out of the middle of it in the shape of a peace sign. Upon further inspection, we also discovered that there is a ring (think circumference) of shrubs around the outside, and the instructions on the fertilizer bags said to handle fertilizing those differently.

Well, we ARE a math class and we just happen to be in a geometry unit currently studying area and circumference of circles, so perhaps we can help Mr. Bryden out. We will be spending the next few days planning out how to solve this interesting real-world math problem and then actually solving it.

Silence is…

stewartn — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:55:20 +0000

Pre-Algebra class was completely silent yesterday. As students arrived I put my finger to my lips and zipped them, pointed toward their seats and made the universal gesture for sit down and read (i.e. I put my hands together as in prayer then opened them like a book and stared at them.) Clever students that they are, they caught on. Once everyone was seated and quietly reading, I lightly tapped a desk to get their attention and give them silent instructions.

The silence was because the class next door was doing state required ISAT testing. What came next was because I still had a class to teach.

Silently, with gestures, students were put into small groups. I pointed to the board where the rules for the class were written (e.g. all communication was to be written or with pantomime), along with the 5 activities each group was required to complete. I pointed to Get scratch paper here to write notes on and Pick up activity 1 here, etc.

There were a few grumblers at first, but quickly most everyone got into it. Students worked silently, gesturing wildly to each other and writing notes to each other as they calculated, charted and mapped the increase or decrease in the House of Representatives from each state based on the last census. Silently, they drew triangles on a geoboard when given only the hypotenuse, and then calculated the length of the hypotenuse using the Pythagorean theorem.

As a teacher, it was challenging not to whisper suggestions. But I found it worked better to answer questions in writing and to show or draw errors rather than explain them. It was amazing how carefully students attended to my answers when they had to wait for me to write them out. The best moment came when students were plotting right triangles on the geoboard – points on a grid that they draw lines through to create geometrical objects. The instructions told the students to use a ruler to draw the lines connecting the points. They assumed that they were supposed to use the rulers to measure the sides of the triangles as well. By drawing loops from point to point to point, I was able to show them that they were to compute the sides of the triangles in generic units rather than in inches or centimeters. As I pointed this out to each group (always silently) the response was the same: The look of Ah Ha!

We have this bulletin board in our classroom that says “A Picture is Worth 1000 Words.” Hmm. I am wondering if something else is worth 1000 words…Ah Ha!