teachers learning math together
Eric shared activities from a draft lesson on factors, multiples, primes and composites. The lesson is linked in the post if you are interested in using the materials from the meeting. He would love feedback if you use it with a class.
To start off the meeting, Eric put us into groups and gave each group a bag of paper tiles. He asked us to spend a few minutes looking at them and discussing anything we noticed.
We explored a problem related to volume and surface area with multiple solutions. But wasn’t one of them more right than the others?
–Updated April 2, 2021 to remove the Wet Phone task published originally in Middle Grades Geometry and Measurement (Steele, 2006). Our apologies to the author Michael Steele for posting your intellectual property.–
Cynthia started today’s meeting by saying that she would be sharing a problem from a recent workshop she attended on multiple solution tasks (MSTs). These problems are designed so that there are multiple correct solutions. In our math circle, we have grown accustomed to seeing multiple strategies for solving a problem, but usually there is one correct solution. Even after we saw different solutions later on, there was something nagging at me. Are they both equally correct? Really? Continue reading “The Wet Iphone Task”
NYC CAMI revisited the Grid Power problem and modeled the collective problem-posing/problem-solving process of CAMI meetings.
At this year’s NYC ABE Conference, Jane, Eric and Mark brought back the Grid Power problem from the summer 0f 2016.
Continue reading “CAMI Roadshow: 2018 NYC Adult Basic Education Conference”
We welcomed two first time CAMI members to a meeting where we once again looked deeply at something that is so familiar, we take it for granted. Greg Fein’s exploration helped us to unpack tic-tac-toe and find the math. It turns out is an ancient game with roots all over the world, with perhaps something innately human at the heart of it.
Greg started by putting a familiar drawing on the board and asked us what came to mind:
We responded with “tic-tac-toe, hashtag, 9 squares, right angles. parallel lines…”
Greg then focused us on our first impression and asked us to remember the rules of tic-tac-toe:
Continue reading “There’s More to Tic Tac Toe than You Know…”
In this meeting we looked at the divisibility rules for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 and tried writing our own rules for larger numbers.
In this meeting hosted at 3rd Avenue VFW by teachers at MDC Brooklyn, we continued recent explorations into multiplication and factors. In this meeting, we looked at divisibility rules. After a pair/share and introductions, I asked the group to look at multiples of 9 and share what patterns they noticed. We shared in small groups then talked about a few things people noticed.
Looking for the surprising in the familiar, we see what happens when you look, really look, at the multiplication table and tumble through the looking glass.
I once taught a poem by Wallace Stevens called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” to a class of adult literacy students. Before I gave out the poem I put the title on the board and asked students what they thought the poem was going to be about. They had all kinds of ideas about looking at blackbirds. Then I asked them, “What about the first part? What does that mean Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird?”And they said things like:
Continue reading “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Multiplication Tables”
CAMI plays around with a way to practice multiplication, think about area and extend into algebra and generalizations. Through art!
For our final CAMI meeting of 2017, I wanted to spend some time at a CAMI meeting doing some math that would create some thing visual and beautiful. As I was looking around for activities to bring to the group, I came across the website, Math Pickle (as in “Put your students in a pickle”). They had a trove of math problems that I look forward to exploring in future CAMI meetings. The one I chose for this one is at its core an opportunity for students to practice multiplication in a way that is much more engaging than just memorizing facts and doing worksheets. And it builds works of art. As I started to play around with it, I started to notice different ways to think about how to make designs with the best score. Continue reading “Mondrian Art Puzzle”
Have you ever noticed the money left over on a Metrocard when you have “insufficient funds” to ride the train? Is it possible to break even? It seems to be part of an MTA conspiracy.
In this meeting on our third anniversary, I tried out a 3-Act Math Task I’ve been planning for a while. It’s got to do with the 5% bonus the MTA gives us on non-unlimited MetroCards and the odd remainders I often find when I run out of funds on the card.
Several engaging activities for exploring factors. Which would you use for HSE math classes and how would you use them?
I puzzled over what to bring to today’s meeting for days. I have a couple unfinished problems that I’ve been thinking to bring to a CAMI meeting, but in the end I chose to go with a few activities on factors, mostly from Fostering Algebraic Thinking, by Mark Driscoll. A group of us read the book last summer and loved the problems. There were so many good ones that we weren’t able to solve them all while reading the book. I went into this meeting hoping that the surprise of the central problem wouldn’t be ruined. Continue reading “Multiple Factors”
Exploring some of the mathematics in packing a shipping container.
For today’s CAMI meeting, Mark was trying out a draft of a lesson that he wrote with Eric involving volume and units in a workplace context. The problem we explored involves trying to fit rectangular boxes into a shipping container. Continue reading “Can you fit more boxes in a shipping container than Jane can?”
