Welcome Back to Grade 10

We’re back in action at KSS today! We started off with some introductions, and got to work. In grade 10 applied math we filled in an introductory page with a twist. Students need to graph how they felt towards math over the years. This was inspired by work from Liesl McConchie who posts here on Twitter.

I can get an idea of graphing skills and also see how a student’s math journey has gone. It’s a spring board for future conversations. It’s followed by some questions about their math experiences and how to help them do their best.

Tonight I can read and learn more about my students, and be more responsive tomorrow based on this information.

From what I saw as they were graphing their experiences, I made a choice to start my grade 10 applied class with some dot talks to have an entry point for all students, and a chance to see how we all can think about problems in unique ways and we can learn from each other if we share our ideas.

Dot images from Number Talk Images are flashed on the screen for 3 seconds, and then students are asked how many dots there were and how they knew. For this one, some students used “fast counting” since there weren’t so many dots. Others saw the dots in groups and showed how the groups helped their counting. We had fun annotating the picture using all the colours, and representing our thinking with math as well.

Students engaged with the task, and were keen to share their ideas.

We next looked at a which one doesn’t belong thought routine, where we need to brainstorm reasons why each quadrant might not belong with the others. We used lots of vocabulary about measuring sides, and angles, and counting angles, and colour of the shape, and if it was sitting on a horizontal side, or on a corner.

we then had a look at some patterning from grade 9, where we drew figure 0 and figure 4 and then noticed how the pattern was changing each time.

We determined that this pattern grows by 2 each time, and it starts at 1 for figure 0. We used this information to figure out how many trees are in figure 10, figure 100 and figure 1000. We’re going to do more patterning tomorrow.

The highlight for some students was our game at the end of class. We stood in a circle and counted around, with each student saying a number in order. When we got to a multiple of 5 though, we had to say buzz instead of the number. Anytime we missed saying buzz, or said buzz instead of the number, or said the wrong number, that person had to sit down. We’re pretty good at identifying multiples of 5 because they end in 0 and 5. This game can evolve (and will) over time to include a few pieces of information to keep track of, but for today we started with just one thing.

It was a fun start today! We’ve got a big busy group, and we’ll make good progress this term.