Archery, Mosaics, and XC, OH MY! Week 27 April 8-12, 2013

Man what a great week!

So on Monday I wanted to do something different.  Our After School program has had archery equipment for a while, and I am the certified Archery Instructor for the program....so I thought, how can I use this in Math?

So I went out, set up the targets and equipment and then got a piece of chart paper, drew it into spaces and put a math problem in each space.  So in other words, I taught them archery, and as they shot they would have to solve the problem that their arrow landed in to earn their team points.  The kids had a blast and so did I, even if it was CRAZY windy!

The on Tuesday we started a Mosaic project I found on Pinterest.  Again, it's one of those ideas I found on Pinterest and then totally transformed it to fit my class.

Here's what my students did....they were given a piece of large chart paper.  Then they were given a ruler and had to decide if they were going to make their squares 1 in by 1 in, 1.5 inch by 1.5 inch, or 2 in by 2 in.

After they made that decision they went and got construction paper to begin cutting their squares to make a mosaic self portrait of themselves.  This took QUITE a while because I was continually going around making sure they were actually measuring and making squares instead of a bunch of rectangles.  It took two class days for each class to finish (which totals to about 2 hours); and some students had to have a working lunch or take it home to finish it.

So after everyone was done, on Thursday we did the math with it!  First they had to write a fraction displaying how much of each color they used.  Then they had to simplify those fractions....yes some of them had VERY large denominators (that we normally don't work with in 5th grade) so I let them use calculators when simplifying the fractions (hey, we use calculators as adults!).

After they wrote and simplified their fractions, then they had to determine the perimeter of their shape (depending on what measurement they chose to use at the beginning).

And after they determined the perimeter of their picture they had to determine the area of their shape (not counting the eyes, hair, or neck).

It was a lot of math, but it was really fun!  And afterwards we got to display them in the hallway.  Since my kids are now Minecraft addict they were all commenting about how much their people look like Minecraft characters, which I found pretty funny.

This week was also fun because the students got to use their devices, and QR codes to do a warm up using SMART XC (extreme collaboration).  The kids scanned the green QR code, answered the question, then scanned the black QR code, which connected them to the SMARTboard, and they typed in their answer.  Their answer then shows up on the board somewhere and after we have a bunch we can see which one is correct!  And what's great is I can choose for the information to be anonymous so no kid has to worry about being made fun of if their answer is wrong.  Thanks to @RafranzDavis for showing me this!

So it was another great PBL week, with still no test formatted questions.  We're learning AND having fun! Couldn't be better!