Friday, September 15, 2017

7th Grade Math in MN: Days 13-17

Week 4
Day 13: White Board Game & Histograms
Day 14: Intro to Mean as Fair Share
Day 15: Interactive Notebook Notes & Mean as Balance Point
Day 16: WoDB and Median Activity
Day 17: Prodigy Intro (hearing & vision screening)

This week our goal was to get through all the mean and median lessons we needed.  Although we didn't make it, the students did learn lots about mean and median.

Day 13:
We started the week with White Board Game like usual.

White Board Game Questions

We then transitioned to a lesson on Histograms that begins with a Which One Doesn't Belong.  Since this our first unit of the year, this is the first Which One Doesn't Belong of the year.  So I had to introduce the activity to the 7th graders who had never done this activity before.  I start with a slide with a terrible super easy which one doesn't belong that has 1 obvious answer.  We talk about how this is a boring problem because it is way to easy and only has 1 answer.  We then did 2 practice WoDB's to get the idea.  


Intro to Which One Doesn't Belong


Warm Up #1 - WoDB 


 Warm Up #2 - WoDB

Finally the Histogram WoDB

The students did struggle a little with the histogram discussion.  They pointed out a couple obvious ones and then struggled to come up with any more.  So I will be looking to retool this one for next year.  

The students finished off the day in a hurried fashion with the histogram card sort.  That went great for the short time we had left.  It was our last day of histograms and I am confident students can make histograms and compare Shapes, Outliers, Center and Spread between 2 histograms.  

Day 14: Introduce Mean as Fair Share (Lesson 6.8.9)
We started with the prescribed warm up from the lesson which went great.  The students dove right in and found so many great solutions.  The students quickly realized they needed a sum of 16.  I love how this warm up gets the students thinking about the total involved with finding the mean.  It makes teaching how to find a missing value, given the data and the mean, so much easier of a jump.  So again, I am loving the discussion and setup of this curriculum!

The students then transitioned to a problem involving getting cats into crates.  It is a great basis to get them thinking about mean as fair share.  It makes the idea approachable and easier for the students to relate.  They solved these problems rather easily and we then had a great discussion about their solutions.

I loved the setup and discussion of these problems so much, I added this question to Activity 1.  I was worried that I was jumping the gun, but the students handled it great!  I need to work on the formatting of the question, but overall it was a great add to the problem.  

Day 15: INBs & Mean as a Balance Point
We put a couple notes about SOCS and measures of center in our notebooks today.  It was the first time we added math content to our notebooks.  It took a long time.  In fact we only got to try Activity 1 from Lesson 10 from 6-8.  The students seemed to grasp the idea of the balance point as mean.  We have been talking about a balance point for dot plots and histograms the entire time, but this let us put numbers to the discussion.  


Day 16: Median
We started with a quick warm up (which was actually the FA from day 15.  I asked the students about variability of 3 sets.  They quickly came up with the right answer and this led to a deeper discussion of variability.  

Today was  classic line up by length of name activity.  I used this as a launch point for finding the 5 number summary.  So we started with min and max and then median.  We then talked about using a method for median besides crossing off on both ends.  The visual of having students up and in a line always helps this.  We then concluded this by showing how to find quartiles.  (It is such a natural extension of this lesson.  

Day 17: Screening & Prodigy
This day of class was mostly taken up by hearing and vision screening.  So I quickly introduced the kids to the math game Prodigy.  Despite complaints (for only the first minute or so) they quickly got totally engaged and were totally into the game play.  I even saw some kids carrying around their iPads during lunch so they could continue to level up.  So not bad, for a day of 10 minute classes.  

Resources:
Lesson 9 Google Doc, PDF
Lesson 10 Google Doc, PDF
Lesson 13 Google Doc, PDF








No comments:

Post a Comment