Creative Math

What the boys have been making:  My goal for math this year has been to include more projects and note taking so the boys are not simply on the computer doing the Teaching Textbooks program every day.  Here are the last of the projects we did in math for the year.  Unfortunately, we will not have time to do any special final math project.  I hoped to have them math a math dictionary, but there are other ways I want to spend our last four days together.

Math secret code coordinate graphs - We were learning about coordinate planes.  I found a great website that had a secret drawing.  The boys had to follow the coordinates and connect it together to see the image.  This forced them to learn the true importance of whether x or y comes first.  :)  Then I had them make their own and swap with a classmate.  It was interesting to see what secret drawings they came up with.

Stem and leaf plot projects - We studied different ways to display data.  If there had been more time, I would have loved to have the boys pose a question and ask people to gather data.  However, I gave them a list of data points that they had to creatively express in a stem and leaf plot.  They also had to find the median, mode, range, and mean of the data.  I thought it was so neat they took the assignment and ran with it.  I hadn't even thought of making a tree instead of a flower.

I still cannot believe I am almost done with my second year of teaching.  How are you finishing up? 

Con mucho amor. 

Pi Day

What we've been eating: Monday was 3/14, a very important day in the math world.  Last year I did not celebrate the day with the boys, but this year Christin did an awesome job leading the morning activities.  I had an interview that morning, so I was unable to attend the whole time.

The kids started off reading this awesome article from Smithsonian Tween Tribune.  They had some neat ideas to help celebrate the day.  Here is their list of ways to celebrate and engage students.

There was a pi contest for who could memorize the most digits of the number.  Andrew got to 28 digits and Lesly memorized 30!

There was also a t-shirt decorating contest.  The kids came up with the most creative designs.  Lesly's t-shirt said "QT Pie" with a picture of a pie on the back.  

I found this article with different pi/math themed movies.  We watched An Invisible Sign which was interesting, different, and connected well with Pi day.  While we watched the movie, we munched on Christin's awesome pies.

It was a fun day to celebrate math.

Con mucho amor.