Math Project: Furnish A Hotel Starting with an IKEA catalog, a hotel furnishing math project was born. Use this project as a tool to differentiate your math instruction and impart some practical knowledge on your students.
Why Pi? Pi Day is just around the corner, but the typical fare include π art projects, memorization challenges, or other activities that separate π from its real uses. But π is such a fascinating topic that it should inspire curiosity and wonder on its own.
Differentiate Math with Inductive Learning With inductive learning, we still define terms, explain rules, and practice, but the order is different. We’re harnessing gifted students’ natural abilities to enhance our lessons.
Math Game: Heaps Heaps is a lovely math-y strategy game that requires no more than paper and pencil to play.
Fixing my “Think Like A Statistician” Frame I used a Depth and Complexity Frame like this with my math students. Let’s look at how we could improve this. Some problems: It asks four unrelated questions. I want to build a sequence of questions that climbs Bloom’s Taxonomy. Most of the questions are naturally answered with “yes” or “no” or a list. Questions […]
The Collatz Conjecture A "conjecture" is an idea that is believed to be true, but has not yet been proven. They are authentic unanswered questions for students to explore. The Collatz Conjecture uses two simple rules to get from any number to 1. It seems to work for all numbers...
Depth and Complexity: Ethics… In Math!? The Ethics prompt of depth and complexity fits so easily into the humanities… but what about ethics in math?!
Constructing Meaningful Math Projects Here are four key attributes I look for when developing math projects: juicy data, interesting conflict, an expert's lens, and a final product.
Explore Geometry: Area and Perimeter The problem is that we dive in with formulae before students have their bearings. Let your students get their hands dirty with geometry. They've got to play with the shapes and explore. Beginning adders and subtractors work with manipulatives before they delve into abstract arithmetic. Older students are still beginning geometers. Give them a chance to touch the math and have some fun.
An Apple Stock Math Project Entice your gifted mathematicians with real world data and an authentic problem such as: "Let's say that instead of buying the original iPod, you spent the same amount of money on Apple stock. How much would that stock be worth now?"
