Grow Beasts

 For the past week we have been growing dinosaurs.  On Halloween day we started off with every student getting a small dinosaur.  They got to name their dinosaur and we measured the length and found the mass.  We had some great names like Oliver aka Huckabeast and Timothy his best friend, along with Paco and his best friend Taco.  The students had a great time naming their dinosaur and I've even heard them call them by name over the past week.  We made some predictions about our dinosaurs' growth using rate of change and now that we have pretty much grown them to their maximum size, we are exploring graphs of the data collected and again rate of change.  Mrs. Wilson, our science teacher, suggested we also look at the volume so we could determine the density of our dinosaurs so we used water displacement to accomplish this.

Now that our dinosaurs have reached their maximum growth, we are going to shrink them and see if they will go back to their original size.  It will also be interesting to see if they shrink at the same rate they grew and how if at all the density will change.  This is the first time for me for these "grow beasts" and it has been a lot of fun for me and the students!

Oh, and the picture projects came out great!  I can't wait to share some of them!

Picture Project

Well, we're halfway through the semester and I have already slacked off on keeping up with my blog.  I am really disappointed in myself, because as I told the parents, "if I don't have anything interesting to blog about each week, then I haven't done my job."  I feel a little defeated in that I haven't done a good job of doing some exciting things each week, but I WILL improve!

Most of my students are headed to Washington D.C. tomorrow and a small group of us are headed to field trips in the DFW area.  Their assignment is to take a picture, write about the math in the picture, and create a word problem from the picture.  We discussed examples of ideas today and I am really excited to see what the students come up with because they had such great ideas today!  Hopefully I will end up with a fabulous collection of photos and problems we can use the rest of the year.

Sneak Preview of next week..Grow Beasts!

Integer Stories

My Pre-Algebra students were given the task of creating integer word problems from a picture they had drawn.  The idea was to make the problems interesting and include information to solve the problem.  We discussed that to make a good integer problem, we needed to know "where did you start", "how far did you go", and "where are you now".  This was a great activity and gave the students a chance to show some of their creative side too!  I have to admit I got this activity from the NCTM May 2010 issue of Mathematics teaching in the Middle School.

I think next year, I may have the students take actual photographs and write word problems from a real life picture.

Imaginary Numbers

We've been talking in class about Real Numbers.  The Real Number System includes rational numbers, irrational numbers, whole numbers, and integers.  Of course, the students say, "well, what other kinds of numbers are there?"  I've explained there are other types of numbers called Imaginary Numbers and they don't quite get it.  I've done a little research for them and here are a few links, along with a video I suggest anyone interested can look at to understand Imaginary Numbers.
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_number
www.mathisfun.com/numbers/imaginary-numbers.html

Now, don't worry if you don't get it!  You'll have a chance to learn more about them when you get in high school.

Wow, that's a lot!

How many football fields does it take to make a mile, including the endzones... 14 2/3 fields!  Many students did not catch that I said to include the endzones so their answer was a little bit higher.  I also got some answers like 14.7 or 14.67 fields.  If we are talking about a football field what form of the number is best to answer in?  Can we think of the football field in parts or does it have to be as a whole when talking about this particular problem?  Why?

As an extension and for more extra credit, answer the above questions in paragraph form.  Your paragraph is due by Friday, September 23.

How much is a mile?

On Sunday, I was out walking with my two daughters at our neighborhood high school.  We were having a fun time and exercising hard, or at least two of us were!  My oldest daughter, Emily, is quite the athlete and loves to run, but my younger daughter, Lauren..not so much.  As I finished up my laps and sat down with Lauren, Emily kept running/walking laps.  Because Lauren needs to get in shape for soccer, I told her "let's race down the football field!".  As we finished racing and met up with Emily, we started discussing how far she had run doing laps around the field.  Emily then asked, "well how many football fields does it take to equal a mile?"

Here's a real life question you might actually want to know the answer to and you might have to do a little math to figure it out!  For EXTRA CREDIT, determine how many football fields it takes to equal a mile.  Include both endzones in your computating.  You must show your work on paper and then using WORDS, explain your reasoning and how you came up the with solution.  This is due by Friday, September 16. 

We'll let you know the answer after Friday!  And in case you were wondering, I only wish this was the picture of my neighborhood with the beach in the background! :)

The Math in a Garden

This week I tried a new experiment.  The experiment was to show the students a picture, have them ask questions about it, and develop a word problem from the picture.  Of course, the first thing the students said about this picture was, "this is an overgrown garden with lots of weeds."  Yes, it is, but it DID produce a lot of great vegetables this summer!

Once we got past how the garden looked, the students commented that the garden was L-shaped and that it was built up with two boards.  We talked about the process of building the garden and we came to wonder how many bags of soil it would take to fill this garden and how much it would cost.  The students quickly realized we needed to know the volume of the garden so we calculated that.  Then I had pulled up two different bags of soil from the Home Depot website.  Because I had measured the garden in feet, we saw that the bag labeled 40 lbs was not going to be helpful for us at this moment.  Therefore, we took the 1.5 cubic foot bag and calculated that we would need 70 bags of soil and that it would cost a lot of money!

After solving the problem, we then wrote out what we did and presto, we had a word problem!  The point I made to them...life IS one big word problem!  This was a wonderful, engaging activity and I hope to do more like this throughout the year.  If you have any pictures, that provoke a math question, send them my way.  I would love to look at them and develop a math problem from it!

Calculator Time!

This week we pulled out the calculators in Algebra.  I am both excited and nervous to be using our new TI-Nspire calculators!  These are very different than the older versions of graphing calculators, but they proved to actually be a little friendlier to use.  We practiced inputting points into a spreadsheet, creating new document pages, graphing our data, and experimenting with different functions on the calculator.  The students like that the calculator has a touchpad function and found that they could "grab" points and shift their picture around.  Here are a few pictures from our day's work.

You can see that the students were very focused and while they may have looked a little frustrated, the activity went fairly well and most students felt good about what they accomplished.  Our final product was a picture of a fleur-de-lis.

Cups and All About Me!

Wow!  What an awesome first few days we had!  I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know all the students through their "Me Circle Maps" and hearing about their likes and dislikes.  I can't believe some of them don't like chocolate!

We also did a great activity with styrofoam cups.  Our objective was to find out "how many styrofoam cups stacked will it take to reach the top of Mrs. Adams' head".  To trick the students, I measured in centimeters, otherwise it would have been too easy.  We found out it took about 86 cups.  I was amazed to see the thinking process from all of the students and was quite impressed!  We used a circle map to help organize our thoughts and solving process and the students went right to work.

 Do you want the cups stacked this way?

Let's see the height of two cups stacked together.

A circle map to organize the process.

"See how the cup as a top part or rim?"

So Mrs. Adams didn't buy enough cups so we are adjusting to determine if it really takes 86 cups.

Thanks for a wonderful start to the year!

Welcome!

Welcome to Mrs. Adams' 8th grade math class!  I am so very excited about the school year and I hope you are too!  This summer I went to a fabulous math conference and got many great ideas that I plan on trying this year.  One of the ideas was to start a blog so that students and parents could both feel more a part of the class.  My goal is to share activities that we do in class, post pictures of us doing those activities, and maybe share some fun math stuff you might be interested in.  This is a work in progress, but I hope you will enjoy it!

Unfortunately in math we are always crunching numbers and we rarely get to talk personal, so I'm hoping this blog will also help me and my students get to know each other better and share things we don't get to share in class.  Therefore, I will start us off!  The top ten things you might want to know about me:
1)  My family is the most important thing in my life!  I have 2 precious daughters and a wonderful husband, not to mention a huge extended family that I think the world of!

2)  My favorite color is pink, pink, pink!
3)  I am the middle child inbetween 2 super brothers that I love to pieces!
4)  I am part Italian and my Italian family makes homemade sausage during the holidays with an old-fashion sausage maker.
5)  I love to cook...when I have time.
6)  The beach is my favorite vacation spot.
7)  I love to volunteer at my daughter's school and am very involved in the PTA there.
8)  I love sports!
9)  The Horned Frogs are my HOME TEAM!  Go FROGS!
10)  I love to read!  If I get a good book I am likely to read it in 24 hours because I can't put it down.

There you go!  Some fun fast facts about me.  I'm looking forward to a great year!