What's the Big Idea?

Our Big Idea in Math

"Decimals, fractions, and percentages can be represented in a number of ways that have the same value."

Investigate

Second graders investigated this question:

Prove It & Show Evidence

The Pursuit of Curiosity

With Einstein's advice in mind, we thought about how we could use our students' interests and curiosities to initiate learning.

It all started with getting our students to ask questions and to get used to the idea of catching and jotting down any thoughts they had in their mini notebooks or on a Post-it:

We began the conversation with our students by showing curiosity-boosting videos, such as Caine's Arcade and asking:

• What do you want to learn more about?
• What makes you curious?

Students had to think about things they were really into and start a "Heart Map" of passions to explore. 

Then they made a plan on how to gather more information based around their curiosities and passions. A structure was provided to help guide them in their inquiries, but they ultimately decided what questions or passions to explore, and will eventually determine how to share what they have learned.

During this process, students:

• Worked on their research skills
• Browsed the library shelves and learned to use the Dewey Decimal system to gather books about their passion
• Read nonfiction text and used web resources and videos to further their knowledge
• Developed more questions as their inquiry progressed
• Worked on "cave boy/girl" note taking skills by writing down notes in their notebooks

Here's a sampling of student curiosities: 

• Izzy and Theresa have hooked onto the topic of salons and hair dressing, specifically exploring a variety of hairstyles and how to recreate them. 
• Paula's interested in learning more about why people start wars. She's inquiring into World War II. 
• Dan was really motivated after watching, "Caine's Arcade," he's decided to look into the many uses of cardboard and is researching ideas on what to make with cardboard. 
• Amanda's into art and crafts, so she's checked out books about crafting and is now working on a project to do with photo frames and flowers.
• From our last unit, we looked at how the Egyptians used obelisk to measure time. Minh Thu was really excited to further her curiosity of Egypt. With Ms. Sophie, the librarian's help, she was able to find a second-grade friendly book on Egypt. 

Our next steps will probably include:

• Having students share through a curiosity gallery. 
• Improve self-motivation for learning by incorporating curiosity-driven learning into their homework

Confused with Fractions...Great!

We started with the question: 

What comes to your mind when you think of the word fraction, decimal, and percent?

Using their prior knowledge, students generated their ideas through words and pictures. 

• "I've seen decimals and percents in the store." - Dong Jae
• "I remember getting 100% on a test." - TJ
• "I think fractions are sharing because I played a game on the computer one time called Fractions Pizza and I had to share the pizzas in the restaurant." - Minh Thu

Figure It Out

Students were engaged in a fractions, decimals, and percents provocation designed to create confusion. They were tasked to look for connections and similarities or differences between the three. 

During this learning process, students worked on their group decision making skills and had to justify why certain sorts should go together. 

Reflect and Connect

Students reflected on the patterns they noticed between the three and were asked to make connections to create their own understanding using the visible thinking routine: "I used to think, but now I know..."

Weight a Minute!

This week my students continued working towards becoming "Masters of Measurement" through investigations exploring the weight of items.

One group looked at real life items that we buy in shops and identified the weight of each item using grams and kilograms and then sorted them from lightest to heaviest.

Another group completed a weight scavenger hunt by searching around the classroom for items that had a certain criteria e.g. two items that weighed together are more than 1 kilogram but less than 2 kilograms.

Another group worked on problem solving an open ended question relating to measurement. 

School to Home Challenge. Students were asked to follow up on their learning by blogging their response to the following questions:

• Imagine you had to measure the length, width and weight of a wild tiger. Which would be the hardest to measure and why? Rank the ways of measuring in order of difficulty. e.g. 1) Length - most difficult because...
• Can you find 5 items in your home that have grams and kilograms written on them?
• What was easy or tricky when you were completing the scavenger hunt?

Tessellations

Students were posed the following inquiry:

Regular tessellations (1) use identical regular polygons (2) to fill a space. The vertices (corners) of each polygon must match up with the vertices of other polygons.

You can produce exactly three regular tessellations:

Can you convince yourself that there are no more?


Test your ideas on this website: http://nrich.maths.org/content/id/4832/polygons.swf  


NOTE:

1. A tessellation is a pattern made of identical shapes:
   • the shapes must fit together without any gaps
   • the shapes should not overlap
2. Polygons are (2D) shapes with straight sides. To be a regular polygon all the sides and angles must be the same, eg. square, hexagon, pentagon.

Here are the students hard at work: