Carol Cashion, teacher of math and other high school equivalency subjects at the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, and I co-led this meeting. In October, I observed Carol’s class when she introduced factors using blocks. I was interested to see how the approach opened up a tangible way of playing with factors and concepts such as greatest common factor. In our teachers’ circle, Carol explained her lesson plan and then we explored “prime factor stacks” as a problem-posing and problem-solving method. -Eric
Continue reading “Prime Factor Stacks”What Would I Think If I Didn’t Know?
For this meeting, Sarah invited us to explore the weird and wonderful world of numbers between 0 and 1. We started with a notice/wonder on this set of equations (suggested by Eric):
Happy Numbers
For this month’s meeting, we returned to explore some numbers we first encountered in CAMI back in 2015 (Happy Numbers and the Melancoil).
After some community building, we started our exploration with a notice/wonder of this diagram.
Sarah’s Passing Drill
In another edition of revisiting problems from the CAMI vaults, at this month’s meeting we went back to further explore a number pattern we first looked at in January 2017 (Carl’s Basketball Problem).
We started off discussing WHAT IS SIMILAR? WHAT IS DIFFERENT? looking at these four expressions:
Sequences of Fractions
In this meeting, we deconstructed a problem from NCTM’s Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching PK-12, using a few ideas from The Art of Problem Posing, by Stephen I. Brown and Marion I. Walter.
Here’s the original problem:
Diagonals in Rectangles
2024 marks the 10th anniversary of CAMI (!) and to honor all we have learned and all the ways we have grown as a group, we are going into the vaults for a few CAMI meeting, to reopen and revisit some of our early explorations together. This month’s meeting was a new take on a problem we explored in June 2016 at Making and Testing Conjectures: The Diagonal Problem.
We started with a Which One Doesn’t Belong?
Fun with Paper and Scissors and Tape
We started off this meeting with a brainstorm of what you can do with paper. Check out our Jamboard to see all the varied and creative ideas we came up with.
I then led the group through an exploration that involved cutting, taping, noticing, wondering, making a prediction, and then more cutting. Here is a link to the slides. You can follow the pictures to do the exploration yourself.
Continue reading “Fun with Paper and Scissors and Tape”Function Diagrams
I decided to lead a meeting on function diagrams because I’m intrigued by the possibilities of teaching with them and because I wanted to introduce the resources that the math educator Henri Picciotto makes available. I have to admit that I haven’t spent that much time thinking about to teach with function diagrams, but I was interested to see what we can learn together by exploring this visualization.
Continue reading “Function Diagrams”Shadow Math
During our Tuesday, April 18th CAMI meeting, Gina Cortez and Amy Vickers facilitated a conversation around shadows.
Notice/Wonder
We showed this slide and asked the group what they noticed and wondered.
Celtic Knots at COABE 2023!
Mark and I led a hybrid in-person/virtual presentation at the COABE conference in Atlanta, GA at the beginning of April. Since then, new people have joined our mailing list and a recent meeting on April 18th. We’re happy to have you as new members.
You can watch the recording of the meeting below. The padlet mentioned in the meeting (with links to Celtic knots and related tools) is here: https://bit.ly/CAMICOABE2023. Enjoy!