Classrooms are back in session in the United States, which means lots of classroom action, lots of it great.

The blogger at Simplify With Me posts two interesting activities with dice, one involving blank dice, and the other involving space battles:

Once you have your ships, place one die on the engine, one on the shield, and the other two on each weapon. Which die on which part you ask. That’s the magic of this activity. Each person gets to decide for themselves.

Kathryn Belmonte posts five more uses for dice in her math classroom.

Kate Nowak set the tone for her school year with debate about a set of shapes:

Then I said, okay, so here’s a little secret: what we think of as mathematics is just the result of what everyone has agreed on. We could take our definition of “the same” and run with it. In geometry there’s a special word “congruent” where specific things, that everyone agrees to like a secret pact, are okay and not okay. Then, I erased “the same” and replaced it with “congruent,” and made any adjustments to the definition to make it correct. They had heard the word congruent before, and had the perfectly reasonable middle school understanding that congruent means “same size and shape.” I said that that was great in middle school, but in high school geometry we’re going to be more precise and formal in our language.

Hannah Schuchhardt isn’t happy with how her game of Transformation Telephone worked but I thought the premise was great:

I love this activity because it gives kids a way to practice together as a group and self-assess as they go through. Kids are competitive and want their transformations to work out in the end!

Featured Comments

Mary Dooms:

Kate does a great job connecting all the dots by focusing on the learning target at the end of the lesson. It appears all great classroom action positions the learning target there. Now to convince our administrators.