Week 9 Reflection

This week we were responsible for reading chapter 17, Length and area, and chapter 18, Capacity, volume, Math, Time and Angles, in the Making Math Make Sense Textbook. Patricia started the lesson for the day with an exercise that I found to be very useful. The exercise consisted of Patricia handing out a bunch of little cards that contained the phrases “I have… Who Has”. For example, my hand out had something along the lines of ‘I have Right, Who has an angle smaller than 90 degrees?’ The point of the exercise was to demonstrate knowledge of definitions and shapes etc. So the first person would begin the exercise by reading what they have and then they would pose the Who has question. The next person whose clue was described would then read theirs and the process continues until everyone in the class has read their clue. I thought that this activity could prove to be very useful as it is a good way to test your student’s knowledge of definitions and mathematical concepts. As I described in last week’s blog, many of us do not really know exactly what defines a certain shape, or polygon, and this exercise can be used to identify these gaps in knowledge and give us, as teachers, an idea of what exactly needs to be worked on in class.

            Another useful exercise that we participated in in class was the exercise with the toilet paper roll. The premise of the exercise was that a new school is being built and we needed to find out the amount of steel sheets we would need to construct pillars in the front foyer of the school. We were told that the scale of the pillars would be 1:10 in relation to the toilet paper rolls. We were then responsible for figuring out the circumference and diameter of the toilet paper roll. After this we had to find out the area for the cylinder. We then had to cut the roll in half and again, measure to find out the area. She then asked us to compare the two areas and point out any similarities or differences. Obviously the two areas were the same, but I can see this activity being effective in a classroom lesson where you are trying to demonstrate to the students that the area in these two shapes are the same, even though the shape itself is much different. We then had to do a little bit of inquiry as Patricia posed an OH NO scenario to us where the steel rolls were delivered to the school in a different size. She also explained to us that students usually really enjoy the OH NO scenarios and that they are a good way of consolidating the lesson and letting the students show what they have learned from the first part of the problem.

Jef P. (2007) Pillars [Online Image] http://bit.ly/1PuP5tG

            The lesson plans for the day were also centred on teaching the concepts of Area/Length and Perimeter and Volume/Capacity. Similar to the activity regarding the cylinders and the sheet metal pillars, Sabrina had a great exercise which demonstrated the volume of cylinders in which we were given two pieces of paper, which were the same size, and asked to make two different sized cylinders. She then asked us to decide whether or not each of the cylinders had the same volume even though they were different dimensions. We then filled the cylinders with marshmallows and then compared the amounts to see the volume of the two cylinders. Of course, both cylinders had the same area, but I think that this activity could prove useful in a class lesson in which you were trying to demonstrate volume of cylinders and how even though shapes may have different dimensions, they may still have the same area/volume etc.