Recipes and Proportions

What a fun day we had last week!  My Pre-Algebra classes have been working on proportions and I really wanted to do something fun and have them see how you can use proportions in your every day life.  I decided to take a no cook salsa recipe and queso recipe and have the students increase or decrease the recipes.  We looked at the servings for each recipe and I had each class decide how many servings they wanted to make.  I did it this way because I didn't want it to be as easy as just doubling the recipe.  It was then up to them to decide how much of each ingredient we needed using proportions. 

The next day was cooking day!  The students did such a great job and I think they learned a lot more than just how to use proportions.  I couldn't believe that some of them didn't know how to use a can opener and was amazed to see how some of them had such great knife skills!  It was a great lesson all around and the students really enjoyed it!

Play Doh and Nets!

Happy New Year!  My Pre-Algebra classes are beginning the new year talking about surface area.  They are always a hard bunch to keep entertained so I decided we would explore the nets of our figures with Play Doh.  The students were deathly silent as they cut, sculpted and created their figures!  It was wonderful to see them so engaged and able to understand how to make each figure.  One of the most difficult parts of understanding how to calculate surface area and volume is to be able to visual the object or be able to draw it.  I think we took a positive step today in fully understanding what they shape looks like!  Thanks Mrs. Wilson and Ms. Wood for letting me borrow your cameras too!



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!