I'm trying to do a better job of keeping warm-ups more interesting this year. Instead of just throwing a question up that mirrored the previous day's work, I'm mixing it up a bit.
In Ohio, every junior will be taking the ACT in the spring. And since I spend my day with (mostly) juniors, I thought incorporating some ACT prep would be a good thing to do. So every Wednesday-ish we do some ACT questions (which were so generously donated by Meg Craig!). I used Plickers for the first several weeks; tomorrow I'm going to switch it up and do Socrative.
Last Friday my 4th grader came home from school with a 3x3 grid and asked me if I could put the numbers 1 - 9 in them so that every row, column, and diagonal had a sum of 15. (Using every number once.) She said it was a problem given to them in math that day and no one, including their substitute, could solve it. That was a great one for yesterday! Some of my students worked and got it in a timely manner, some did better once they had the middle square, and some never got there at all. But they all worked on it!
Some students asked me to give puzzles more often, so I'll have to add that to my list.
Last Thursday my 4th grader (she's a wealth of questions) came home from school and told me that she'd read a book that day. She loves to read and does so very quickly, so I wasn't surprised. She'd told me that before. But then I asked what book and she answered, "Harry Potter." Um, what?! I thought maybe it was an abridged junior version or something until she pulled out that 800-page monster out of her backpack (it was book #5 if you're wondering). She claims to have read at the babysitter's in the morning for about an hour, on the bus on the way home for almost an hour, and then walking up the driveway (we have a long driveway but it's not that long). So that was today's warm up: How many words per minute would she have had to read? We even gave her the whole 10 hours that she was gone from the house.
This actually segued into the thought of the world's fastest reader Howard Berg (which I searched an found a YouTube clip of)
and then the next clip on YouTube was a 13-year old girl on Johnny Carson back in the day. Of course the kids had never heard of Johnny Carson, but whatever. It was a fun discussion.
My Precalc warm up wasn't as fun today - I asked the kids to find the intersection of a line and a circle (we'd just discussed the equation of a circle yesterday). I loved how it incorporated writing equations of circles, solving a system of equations, and the quadratic formula all in one fun problem. But they didn't agree with the fun thing.
I pulled in desmos to show how they could've used it and skipped all the algebra...
In Ohio, every junior will be taking the ACT in the spring. And since I spend my day with (mostly) juniors, I thought incorporating some ACT prep would be a good thing to do. So every Wednesday-ish we do some ACT questions (which were so generously donated by Meg Craig!). I used Plickers for the first several weeks; tomorrow I'm going to switch it up and do Socrative.
Last Friday my 4th grader came home from school with a 3x3 grid and asked me if I could put the numbers 1 - 9 in them so that every row, column, and diagonal had a sum of 15. (Using every number once.) She said it was a problem given to them in math that day and no one, including their substitute, could solve it. That was a great one for yesterday! Some of my students worked and got it in a timely manner, some did better once they had the middle square, and some never got there at all. But they all worked on it!
Some students asked me to give puzzles more often, so I'll have to add that to my list.
Last Thursday my 4th grader (she's a wealth of questions) came home from school and told me that she'd read a book that day. She loves to read and does so very quickly, so I wasn't surprised. She'd told me that before. But then I asked what book and she answered, "Harry Potter." Um, what?! I thought maybe it was an abridged junior version or something until she pulled out that 800-page monster out of her backpack (it was book #5 if you're wondering). She claims to have read at the babysitter's in the morning for about an hour, on the bus on the way home for almost an hour, and then walking up the driveway (we have a long driveway but it's not that long). So that was today's warm up: How many words per minute would she have had to read? We even gave her the whole 10 hours that she was gone from the house.
This actually segued into the thought of the world's fastest reader Howard Berg (which I searched an found a YouTube clip of)
and then the next clip on YouTube was a 13-year old girl on Johnny Carson back in the day. Of course the kids had never heard of Johnny Carson, but whatever. It was a fun discussion.
My Precalc warm up wasn't as fun today - I asked the kids to find the intersection of a line and a circle (we'd just discussed the equation of a circle yesterday). I loved how it incorporated writing equations of circles, solving a system of equations, and the quadratic formula all in one fun problem. But they didn't agree with the fun thing.
I pulled in desmos to show how they could've used it and skipped all the algebra...
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