Skip to main content

Making It Metric!

Wow! Time goes by so quickly!
I was just reading (quickly) a few other blogs and noticing quite a few bloggers who are surprised at how much time has past since their last post. Me too! Things are so busy...teaching, planning, grading, helping my own daughter with school work, house stuff, trying to fit in exercise, and trying not to get TOO sucked in to Pinterest as I try to spend a little time looking for new ideas! Oh yeah, and attempting to get some decent sleep!!

I hope everyone is having a good school year so far. I am really happy with our students so far this year! This week, we've been continuing in the metric realm, with creating maps of our classroom, and the students have been doing a great job. The students have measured the length and width of the classroom and at least 5 items in the room, to include on their map. The real challenge now is coming up with a reasonable scale for their maps. We tested out a few scales, like 1 cm = 1 m, but that would give us a map that is only about 8 cm by 12 cm....a bit small. They suggested maybe 1 cm = 1 dm, but that would give us a map that's about 80 cm by 120 cm.....also not the best. Of the four math classes I have, one group came up with a reasonable scale fairly quickly, but the other three are still thinking a bit...

Tomorrow will be interesting as we work on correctly drawing the maps to scale:-)





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Memory Wheels - First Day, Last Day, and Any Day in Between!

This post has been moved to:  http://www.cognitivecardiowithmsmm.com/blog/memory-wheels-first-day-last-day-and-any-day-in-between
7 comments
Read more

Math Class - First Day Activity

Rectangle of pentominoes Many 6th graders seem to have a pretty negative attitude about math, so I try to do something interesting to "grab" them during our first class. Last year, during the first math class, we spent part of the period working with pentominoes. Before working with the pentominoes, however, we played a name game so we could learn each others' names (I find it impossible to start anything else if I don't know some names, and fortunately, I learn them fairly quickly). rectangle outline For the activity, I divided the students into groups of 3 or 4. The directions for the activity were not complicated - the task was to make a rectangle, using all of the pentominoes. I gave students an outline of the rectangle, as pictured to the left, so they would know the correct size of the rectangle. The squares in the grid are each one inch. The rectangle is 5 squares (inches) wide and 13 inches long (13 inches includes the row that has the "Pent
2 comments
Read more

How Much Math Homework??

I am very curious about math homework in middle school, from a teacher perspective:     How much math homework do you give?     What kind of homework do you give?     How do you go over it in class? Let me explain why I ask these questions. I have taught 6th grade math for eight years, and every year, my goal is to "perfect" the homework issue. My basic issue is that I feel that I spend too much time going over it (not necessarily every day, but often). In the past, we have reviewed homework in the following ways:    1. going over answers as a class    2. self-checking answers that are on the board and sharing any questions    3. partner-checking and then verifying    4. choosing only a few problems to check When I taught elementary school (for 12 years), I never seemed to have this problem....we had 60 minutes for class and I never struggled to fit everything in. But at middle school, we have 44 minutes (minus time to switch for classes), and I just haven't fo
10 comments
Read more