First day of Grade 9

We started off Grade 9 with a fun challenge. We’ve done this for many years now, but this group seemed to be particularly good at solving the task and being resilient when confronted with challenges.

The challenges are Sky Scraper Puzzles. They are kind of like sudoku puzzles. You need a building that is 4 floors tall, 3 floors tall, 2 floors tall and 1 floor tall in each row and column. Also, there are numbers on the side of the grids. These numbers indicate the number of buildings that are visible from that location.

There are 4×4 grids which are generally quite solvable once you find a good strategy, and there are 5×5 grids which in the past have been very challenging. This year most groups succeeded. Some solved 3 of the 5×5 puzzles!

We got to experience frustration, elation, teamwork, strategizing, starting over after making mistakes. There were many conversations about how looking at a task from different directions is so important, and trusting your group members to catch some mistakes, and trusting yourself enough to engage in the task with effort.

After we worked through these challenges we celebrated our very first Vennsday! (We celebrate on Wednesdays)

Our Venn for the day was one circle that were divisible by 3, another divisible by 5 and the third was greater than 100. Teams worked together to put as many numbers as they could in the different sections. We had some good chats about the logic used to approach the task, and also some of the characteristics of each section on the diagram, like if something is divisible by 5 and by 3 it will be divisible by 15. We noticed that there is a limitation to how many values are in that particular section. The centre section could actually have many more values, since numbers bigger than 100 keep going forever. We also got to talk about how 100 is not greater than 100, it is equal to 100. Hopefully this type of task will also help when we explore inequalities later on.

We enjoy these weekly moments to talk about numeracy, and to keep bringing up different number sets and their properties, and densities.

Grade 9s did such a good job cleaning up, that we had time for a game of “buzz” like we played in grade 10 (the previous post). Since this class is in French, there are added challenges with being able to say numbers larger than 60. It’s a good thing to practice!