Last week the seventh grade math team invited me down to their rooms to check out a lesson they were teaching on proportional reasoning and scale. The first thing I noticed as I approached the rooms was that students were sprawled everywhere in the hallway. Inside the rooms it was no different—groups of students all busily working on a really cool project. For this assignment, students were given a small printout of a picture of a hornet. They divided their picture into several grid squares, and then each member of the group selected squares and copied their portion of the picture using a much larger scale. As each student finished, they pieced their drawings back together and saw that they had, indeed, replicated the original drawing on a much larger scale. This was a great lesson for many reasons—it was highly engaging for the students to be learning a mathematical concept in a different way, it had great tie ins to Marzano’s similarities and differences work, it gave the students a sense of audience as they knew their work would be displayed for the whole class, and it allowed students to work cooperatively with others—if one group member failed to produce, the task could not be completed. It was great to see students working in this way on their math assignments. Great work Melanie, Linda and Andrea!
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