Ms. Bearse's Site

We are full of beans thse days.  We started planting our garden today.  The first step is germinating the beans.  We are planting black eyed peas and kidney beans.  

We have beans wrapped in moist paper and placed in plastic bags on our windowsill.  

We made a hypothesis of the percentage of beans that will sprout.  We’ll see if we are right in a week.

We celebrated today because we missed the real pi day because of march break.  Pi day is celebrated March 14th (3/14).

We had an amazing recitation of pi…

We watched a Vi Hart video all about pi

We also experimented to determine the relationship between the circumference and diameter of a circle.  To make it more tasty we used licorice laces to make the circles.

We had to approximate some circles, so our data wasn’t perfect.

We made lines of best fit and looked at the rate of change.  On average it was a bit more than 3.  We know it should have been pi.

We ate mini pie and sang our favourite math carol “oh number pi”

All in all it was a good celebration!

Rather than hand out a long list of questions today, each group of two or three were given one question to do, and then they switched cards when complete. 

Our questions dealt with proving what shape was created when 3 or 4 given points are connected.  And calculating perimeter or area or comparing lengths or slopes of diagonals.  

Some students were working on the blackboard

And others were hard at work with the whiteboards

A major break through has come in our class…whiteboard cleaning has been a challenge in the past, but a colleague has suggested that fuzzy socks from the dollar store make the best erasers.  The whiteboards are now always clean, because cleaning them is fun!

We are working on simplifying polynomials.  We made pictures using algetiles and then made zero pairs (identical red and blue tiles) and simplified the images.

Practice with someone who solves problems well!

We are working on using analytic geometry to solve problems, and it can be tricky for some people to decide what tools to use to solve the problem.  Slopes, midpoints, distances are all straightforward calculations-the trick is to come up with an effective plan to solve the problem.

Here’s how the activity worked: One person per group of three begins as the expert.  The groups were designed so that at least one member is a very effective problem solver.  The expert’s job is to verbalize all of their thinking as they solve the problem.  They need to explain what they are thinking, what information they have, what they need, how they can find it.  They need to verbalize if they get stuck, and what they do to get back on track.

The other two people in the group are there to document the strategies employed by the expert.  We chunked the time so that for each time period, the observers had to write two strategies done by the expert.

Once the problem was solved, the next group member tackled the next problem while the others observed.  Everyone in the class was actively solving or paying close attention to someone else as they solved a problem for a good chunk of time.

We are working on our problem solving skills.  We have learned how to find equations of medians and perpendicular bisectors (médiatrice) the length of segments, types of triangles, equations of circles etc.  There are so many different things we can potentially solve for, so it’s important to read carefully and make a picture and come up with a plan.

We worked with partners across the table, then after both partners are experts, one half of the partnership moved one seat to the right, and started again.  We used whiteboards and our new fuzzy socks(erasers) for jotting down calculations and sketches.

We are working towards excellent comprehension before the summative activity on Thursday.

Today grade 10s worked thtrough a challenging problem to determine the height of a triangle algebraically.

Working together, with whiteboards, was a good way to get an idea of what the problem entailed.
Some groups were able to help others once they got on the right track.

These types of questions stretch your brain, and problem solving skills.  The struggle is ok, it’s expected when you do something new.  We are working on being more comfortable with productive struggle.

We met the grade 7 class that we are buddied up with this term.  We have prepared some activities for them that review concepts that they learn in grade 7 and will need in upcoming years too.

We sang “l’aire d’un trapèze” all together and then started our stations.

We had 4 different stations

Some were puzzles

Some were memory and matching games

Some were patterning activites

And we had a rousing game of jeopardy.

This was followed by 5 minutes of intense multiplying (we’re getting much better at it!)

Many thanks to the grade 9s for coming up wih the activities, and to the grade 7s for participating so well.

So many grade 9s were on trips today!  In case you were wondering what we did, we worked on applying formulas for calculating areas of circles, and circumference of circles to composite shapes like this one.

Find the area and perimeter of this shape.

Our first test is Tuesday the 7th