Student's Choice

Recently, I was charged with a very exciting, super awesome opportunity.  I was given permission to pull some of our high achieving students from their science class (after they finish their work, of course) to let them work on....whatever they want!  The only criteria is that this work is productive and helps bring them to the next level and prepares them for high school and eventually college.

I brought these students together to discuss the possibilities.  I told them that I want it to be fun, engaging and productive.  I told them they wouldn't be graded on the projects they choose and we can discuss the opportunity for extra credit in the future but I want the emphasis to be on the experience rather than "credit."  The students need to bring to me ideas or concepts they want to further explore and tell me whether or not they would prefer to work in a big group, small group, or individually.  They started rattling off all kinds of ideas and I'm excited to see what they present to me.  I have seen some awesome projects from students when given an opportunity like this.  If the students have ideas but are unsure of how they'd like to execute them, I have some websites I'd like to utilize:

Illuminations is full of lots of model-based math activities that are structured in a way that would elicit deep understanding and a higher level of thinking than most procedural or fluency based math worksheets.

Teach Engineering is another website full of model-based engineering activities that my students might find fun to explore.



I really can't wait to see what they bring to the table and I will update their progress once we decide on a project or projects they choose!

Math Can Be Fun?

We started small groups in our 8th grade classroom, recently, and after their rotations of centers the students get 10-15 minutes to play a math game of their choice.  We have a few card games and dominoes, some puzzles and 1 iPad.  Not surprisingly, I noticed the iPad is chosen first. After the first week of small groups I took some time to amp up the math choices of games in the iPad. The students seemed to enjoy working on the iPad but the games were too far below their grade level.

I learned about the zondle app in my Middle School Math class at NLU and I explored some of the games that aligned with the standards the students were learning in our class.  I found some inaccurate questions and some really great questions in the zondle database.  I sorted through the questions and assigned the ones I liked to a game inside the zondle app which rewards the students for answering questions correctly.  When I brought this game to some students during their choice time, they were so into the activity.  I had 2 students who are usually distracted and not active participants in class discussions so excited about correctly identifying operations of exponents in order to play cow cakes.  It was awesome.  These kids didn't know they were improving their exponent operation fluency, they were tricked into learning under the disguise of a game.  I can't wait to find more games to help my students become excellent middle school mathematicians!

Zondle has a huge database of questions that cover all disciplines of education.  I look forward to finding more ways to incorporate it into the curriculum.