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Friday, October 30, 2009

Bringing the Math Book ALIVE!


Why wasn't this in the teacher guide?

Check out the youtube video of my students running this simple relay race.





We simply did in REAL LIFE what the book presented in drawings.

By taking 10 minutes outside, we physically experienced the problem. Then we can come back in and work more enthusiastically and energetically with the questions.


Activity from Connected Math 2 Series: 7th Grade, Accentuate the Negative

1 comment:

ZeroSum Ruler said...

I developed a tool that you may find useful to go along with Accentuate the Negative. In the first pages of that workbook is a picture of a numberline folding in half and a caption above a student’s head that reads [something along the lines of] “I owe my dad $4, I have -$4″.

Then students are later told to solve problems like “-12 +7″ by finding -12 on the number line and counting to the right 7 spaces. What happened to the folding number line?

You can visit my blog at http://zerosumruler.wordpress.com/ My tool, the ZeroSum ruler, is a bendable ruler that allows a kid to solve a problem like “-12+7″ by finding both -12 and 7 on the ruler, counting which number is farther from zero (answer will take that number’s sign), folding the ruler in half, and counting the space between the two numbers. There is a video on my site on how it works.

I teach 11th grade Algebra 2 and have seen my students’ biggest stumbling block to be…. combining positive and negative numbers. Here in Boston, CMP2 is the middle school curriculum.

I hope you have a wonderful summer!