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.

Scott Keltner sent a drone up in the sky while his students plotted themselves down below. I emailed Scott and asked for his lesson plan and he sent back something involving playing cards and, frankly, none of it made any sense to me and I seriously don’t understand how the downside of cost, time, and effort could possibly outweigh the upside of drones (!) but I’m so curious. Bug Scott via Twitter to write up what he did here.

Julie Reulbach used zombies to create a need for logarithms. Zombies are, obviously, catnip for some students, but that isn’t what caught my eye here. Julie understood that logarithms are a shortcut for inverting an exponential equation. And if you’d like to create a need for a shortcut it’s helpful for students to experience the longcut, however briefly. Watch her work.

Ollie Lovell used one of my unposted tasks with a group of students in Myanmar who spoke very limited English and whose classroom had no electricity. Imagine how your favorite lessons would have to change under those constraints and then read how Ollie changed his. I learned a lot.

Sarah Hagan shares a game from S T called Greed, which helped turn her students’ perception of box-and-whisker plots from useless to useful. Crucially, the game exploits the need for box-and-whisker plots, which is comparison between multiple sets. Creating a box-and-whisker plot for a single set of data will feel pointless, same as teaching someone to use a carrot peeler by using it to paint a house. That’s not what it’s for!

This goes beyond “great classroom action.” These are great moments that go great lengths towards defining the culture of a classroom.

Nathaniel Highstein offers a full week of activities:

The start of the school year is one of the most important moments for my classes. Setting the right tone and attitude right from the beginning can mean buy-in from students right away — and conversely, a bad start can be really tough to recover from. I had a pretty good start this year in my Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 classes. I wanted to share some things that worked for me in case someone else might benefit, and to document the week, as I may repeat much of this work next year.

You can find lots of posters that describe the practices of a mathematician, the elements of a growth mindset, etc. Sam Shinde went a different direction, turning student work into a poster, and annotating it with mathematical practices.

Nora Oswald uses a viral YouTube video to illustrate the mathematical practice of perseverance:

After we watch this, I like to make the connection to the classroom.
“Do you ever feel like you’re driving around in circles?”
“Do YOU ever feel like you look like a fool and others are laughing at you?”
“Did this woman give up even though she may have looked foolish and stupid?”
“At what point do you ask for help?”

As best as I can tell, Jonathan Claydon has constructed a positive and productive classroom culture entirely out of gags like this.

Featured Comment

Mr. Corey Math:

I use my document camera for students to come up and “sacrifice their mistakes to the math gods”. The class usually makes eating sounds and says “yum”.