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.