12/15/06
Two weeks into Stretching and Shrinking, and we're going strong. It amazes me that my students have days when their brains are exploding with knowledge, and other days when they do not appear to understand anything that is going on.
Last Friday, my teammate Yvette brought her class into my room for a special performance. Her class came to sing a special song about the Wump family. For some reason, our students have been very enthusiastic about learning about the Wumps and their family's rhyming names. Yvette's class sang: "My Wumps, my Wumps, my Wumps, my Wumps, my lovely lady Wumps." Our students LOVED this. Every day my students sing this song at the beginning of class. We sing one verse, and then the students are ready to go.
On Monday, my class was working on problem 2.2, in which students use five rules to change the coordinate pairs for Mug's Hat. In both of my math classes, 98% of students were able to apply the rules and correctly graph the figures. As one of the summarizing parts of this lesson, we created a chart that summarized how a rule will affect the movement of a point or a figure on a coordinate grid.
As they did this exercise, my students were exploding with brainpower. They seemed to anticipate what questions I would ask, and they were ready with a response.
This is the chart we created:
| x | y | |
| X or y + # | Moves to the right | Moves up |
| X or y - # | Move to the left | Moves down |
| X or y * a # greater than 1 | Stretches and gets wider |
Stretches and gets taller |
| X or y * a # less than 1 | Shrinks and gets skinnier | Shrinks and gets shorter |
Once they had the chart, students were able to tell me how a point would move when I gave them a rule for that point. We played a game in which we moved the points around the graph to make shapes, and asked different groups to guess the shapes. I really think that having this chart and giving students the time to practice this skill in class will help them get through the book.
There are also days when my students seem to have their brains turned off. This is when I have a little trouble. Right now one of my biggest struggles is trying to make sure that all students are challenged but still understand the material. When my kids have their brains turned off, it is really hard for me to gauge this. I can already tell that these kids come to us with slightly more basic skill knowledge than last year's students did. I know they have the potential to achieve the goals Yvette and I have set for them; we just have to find a way to get them there. Click here to learn more about the mathematics founds in this unit.
