Annie Forest gives you ten ideas for your last week of class:
Here is my criteria for what makes a good mathy activities for the end of the school year: no/low tech; still incorporate math or problem solving in some way; fun and engaging.
Hey I’ll pitch one in! Here’s an eight-year-old blog post of mine. Every student starts with a 2D paper circle and by the end they’ve collaborated to construct a 3D icosahedron!
Marissa Walczak started carrying around a whiteboard as she helps students with their classwork:
If I wanted to show something to students I would always have to ask if I could write on their paper (which I really don’t ever want to do), or I’d have to say “wait for one sec” and then I’d go grab a piece of scratch paper, or I’d draw something on the board and then it’s far away from the group and then everyone sees it even though I don’t want everyone to see it.
Christine Redemske’s class takes Popcorn Picker to the literal limit, making cylinders that are shorter and shorter and wider and wider.
Tina Cardone gets a lot of mileage out of a very simply-stated arithmetic problem:
In the next question students needed to decide what half of 2^50 would look like. All around the room students wrote 2^25. But children! We just talked about that! And then I realized that 1) it’s far from intuitive, that’s why they included more questions in the book to solidify this idea and 2) the language changed.