A Lumberjack's Lady: May 2013

School is almost out for summer! HALLELUJAH!!! The kids are ready...the teachers are ready...summer is waiting just days away! With the end of the year, comes end of the year exams. For my math exam, the kids have to review over pretty much every topic that we've covered August thru May. Instead of just sitting in class and listening to me babble on, I wanted to do something different! I had an idea about using QR codes to create a scavenger hunt. I went to talk to my good 'ol technology GURU Aimee and told her about my plan. She's helped me and all of Sunnyvale throughout the year with all of our technology shortcomings and we LOVE her! :)

I wanted my kids to be engaged and actually enjoy their review. It took awhile to get it all put together and some planning to get each piece to work correctly, but it turned out GREAT and the kids LOVED it!

I came up with all of the questions that I wanted to use for the review first. Then I went to the website, http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ to create all of the QR codes. Most of the problems I typed into the website and it created a QR code. However, some of the problems I wanted to give the kids needed images. Unfortunately you can't upload images...or at least I couldn't figure out how to do it on this generator. For the problems that I wanted to add a little more to... I would write a question and then tell them to refer to a specific image in the Diagram packet that I gave them. In the Diagram packet, I had 8 pictures or problems that they had to use to find the answer for that question.

I split the kids into groups of 5-7. Each group had specific people in charge of tasks. One person had the job of writing down the finalized answer for the group. Another student was in charge of making sure that had the correct diagram when needed. One kid was designated as the QR scanner. (I took the kids iPhones the day before and downloaded the free app i-nigma for them to have a QR code reader on their phone.) All of the students in the group were responsible for helping each other to get the answer. At the end of the scavenger hunt, the kids graded each other and had to give an explanation of why they were giving their classmate the grade. It's always interesting when you see how brutally honest they are. Some of the responses I got were..."I'm giving him a 100, because she knows how to do all of the math and he was a great leader for our group!" ....and.... "I'm giving her a 73, because she wasn't on task on a few problems and she was kinda mean to us on one question when we didn't all agree." hahahaha! Oh 7th graders....gotta love them!

After I had made up 27 questions, created 27 QR codes, drew 8 diagrams, made 12 copies of the diagram packet, passed out 70 pieces of scratch work paper, came up with 27 different locations to hang the codes, and come up with 27 different little riddles for clues to get them to the next code...I walked around and enjoyed the kids as they searched all over the school and sprawled out in the hallways to answer questions about solving equations, finding the slope of graphs, and solving Pythagorean Theorem. Would it have been TONS easier to just stand at the front of the room and talk and do examples? YES! But watching them get excited about math...that's why I love what I do!

SOLVING THEIR PROBLEMS IN THE HALLWAYS!

QR CODES SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE SCHOOL!

WORKING HARD ON THE PROBLEMS!

This week in class we've been talking about dilations. The actual definition of dilation is...a transformation in which a figure is enlarged or reduced using a scale factor. We've made some great pictures this week in class! The kids have worked so hard.

In Math Lab, we did dilation drawings where we reduced the image by 1/2. In my Regular Math classes, we enlarged the images by 3.

Here are my little artists from Math Lab.

They reduced their image using a 1cm grid and transferred it to graph paper!

Here are the BIG projects! My Regular Math kids worked all week. They used a image and made a 1cm grid over it. We wanted to enlarge our image 3 times as big, so we made a 3cm grid on poster board. They turned out GREAT!!!