My grade seven students have been working really hard on seeing, exploring and building relationships between multiplication and division, fractions, decimals and percentages, rates and ratios. The kids chose partners from both groups (a great way to get Late and Early French Immersion together) and decided on a product to be tested. We had everything from hair elastics to marshmallows and everything in between. As teams they decided on criteria to be judged and came up with their own way of recording their findings (many chose tick sheets). Kickin`it old school but it worked!
On the day of the testing, I invited the members of our grade 12 Leadership class to partake in the experiments as well (free food and another opportunity to mentor Grade 7s in French). We had had a prior discussion about questions they could pose to students (about estimation, hypotheses as well as some conversion of early results) as well as links they could make to more advanced Math courses (As one student said “No way is this the last time you will see fractions. You better know fractions for “le cercle unitaire in Pré-Cal 12”). Students moved around and tested most, if not all of the projects. Yep! To the naked eye there was a wee bit of chaos but out of chaos comes order and understanding. Though a wee bit louder, they were all on task and finished 12 stations in one hour. They even offered to do the dishes!
When we saw each other again after the break the students analysed their findings using what they knew about fractions, decimals and percentages. With the briefest of lessons showing the absolute minimum of Excel and Publisher (perhaps 5 minutes) I just let them loose in the computer lab. My only request was that I wanted a graph – a good one. That’s it. Over the next half an hour students made rudimentary bar graphs. When they said “Madame fini” I would ask them to chat with colleagues on either side for feedback about the look and the layout of their graph. Then they started to manipulate the graphs – change colours, backgrounds, graphs types, font etc. etc. Within a half an hour they had all helped each other out to make publishable graphs. Those students who I identified as “experts” readily helped out some of the struggling students and were thanked by their friends and myself. All their work was saved in their own file on our T-drive to be manipulated again this week when we explore circle graphs. It should go well as we have all of the data already in Excel spreadsheets. Some images were sent home on Remind.
The crazy cool thing about this is that I did not have to do any of the work. Every student just started messing around, experimenting. I asked questions when I saw joy or heard “Ah so that’s how I change colours of an individual bar.” I am no Excel expert by any means so I learned quite a few shortcuts along the way as well. These amazing students are exceedingly kind and patient to me and others in the class and I feel so lucky to be able to guide them.
Leanne Anderstedt
Collège Churchill
Cluster 1971