Year nine and ten students designed games for year seven and eights to teach them about climate change.
We made more progress in our Learning Hub Curriculum. In this session, students were discussing aspects of emotional intelligence.
Had a massive win for algebra. Students used algebra to test out their card game designs. Students found this algebra so useful that they kept referring to it!
I have been exploring triads as a means for gathering an overview of the class and their progress on tasks.
You can never go wrong with a bit of model making! Students were asked to create sculptures that represented the habits of their organisms's environment.
I was able to take three students and three staff to meet Jane Goodall at the Auckland Zoo. Wow!
One of the aspects of our curriculum design at Hobsonville Point Secondary is the way that our learning is presented in contexts. Forces and scientific investigations are represented this term as rocket designing, megastructures or even paired with the physical education curriculum and biomechanics. I am however particularly excited about my maths module this term. Algebra of art. These two learning areas are not usually seen to cross over, hence when students can use equations to make sense of what they are seeing, they have a pretty radical new understanding of how we might make sense of the world with equations.
Thanks to the google art project with its gigapixel images of artworks from all around the world, my students were able to try their hand at generating equations to represent some of Sol LeWitt's artworks. The range of artworks mean that I was able to differentiate for the students with simpler and harder works. They were able to zoom in and examine the structure in intense detail, looking for patterns within the work. Where this wasn't enough, they also used a Minecraft video of the artwork to help. I have a few who are keen to build the next artworks we will be using and I am excited to see what they generate with their own equations too.
Through my work as an e-learning facilitator, I often hear teachers say that maths has been the hardest learning area within which to introduce e-learning. Within my own practice, I found that it was not until I shifted to teaching students maths in a context that e-learning really became relevant. The example above illustrates this beautifully. We could have looked at a pyramid that I had drawn on the board in in a textbook. Instead, by presenting students with a high resolution, manipulatable source of information and applying their learning in a way that helped them make sense of the world, students were incredibly engaged.
There is of course also the major shift that occurred in my practice after reading Jo Boaler's, The Elephant in the Classroom. Increasingly, I have presented students with a problem rather than a method. And in the case of the art works above, as students were working, I could move around the room, prompting and teaching skills as they became necessary. The students are incredibly receptive to learning new methods when they are working on the problems as they can genuinely appreciate the "why are we learning this."
I suspect that I only ever lied to my mum about two things. Number one, "no I do not like that boy." And number two was always about maths. Many years later and maths and I are still fighting with each other. The problem however is that the fight hasn't changed very much. I used to avoid doing maths because I found it boring. Nowadays my fight with maths is all about how to make it less boring. Imagine what you would say to me if this was a relationship... "You didn't like him to start with and then you try and change him? Dump him!" But it seems maths and I are linked and locked together whether we like it or not. A firm believer that change starts at home, with me, I have begun to try and repair the dysfunctional relationship between maths and myself. After all, think of the children! One does not want the children to suffer because of our broken relationship.
I have been working on repairing the relationship for one and three quarters of a year. Although maths and I are stronger than ever, we still have a long way to go. However, after talking it over, we thought it is time we share some of the tools that has helped us rebuild.
I found that planning for maths was a lot more fun if I made things themed. As a result I made a Matrix themed BEDMAS lesson, a baking themed fractions lesson, a Fast and the Furious themed decimal lesson, a superhero themed prime, multiples and factors lesson. Of course themed lessons are rather time consuming to think of and then make. I did however find making them based on a student in the class' interest was very useful too. This is what inspired the pythagoras and trigonometry military tanks lesson, with the assistance of my former military dad (thankfully, as my interests previously extended to shoes, handbags and other things, not howitzer tanks and their range). Since the TES.co.uk actually recommended this lesson in one of their newsletters you would think that the relationship between maths and I was on the mend, however Rome wasn't built in a day.
I teach maths five out of the days in the six day timetable, the above is not enough to sustain the strained relationship between maths and myself. So I needed more. I found more by inventing a constant stream of maths games. For example Multiple Hand Ball - every time you hit the ball you have to say the next multiple. Or Musical Chair Tables - I put timetables on the chairs and then when the music stops I ask you what the answer is of the timetable you are sitting on. You are out if you don't know. Or Power Ranger Inequalities where your are out if you are not the first person to point your arms in the direction of the largest amount or block if the problems on the board are equal. We've also had treasure hunts around the school using coordinates and bearings. We have also had races to solve the equations I wrote in sidewalk chalk around the school.
I have always been fascinated by problems with complicated answers. As such I was pretty excited when I invented Jenga maths for the students to measure angles and see the real world applications of angles in building. Students had to build the tallest possible tower using Jenga blocks in the centre of large circular area called the safe zone. Using a piece of string, students then had to measure the angle from the top of the tower to the edge of the safe zone. The challenge was to build the tower with the largest possible angle where no blocks would fall outside the safe zone when an earthquake hits. I'm pretty sure the students enjoyed this activity as they were all engaged. However more importantly, I loved this activity. Maths was suddenly perfectly relevant, as it should be, to the very real context of New Zealand and the considerations we have to make when building tall structures. And here it seems is the big neon sign that says look here. Maths and I are stronger and better together when real world problems are being simulated, when there is noise, when the challenge extends beyond one right answer.
So could the answer be project based learning? Our next topic is measurement. Maths and I need your help to find a good real world problem to solve, perhaps simulate, question, rework and most likely make some noise because my students and I are having a ball learning. Got any ideas for us?
