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”Tag: prime numbers
A Strange Algorithm
In our first evening meeting, Eric shared a web site that turns pairs of numbers in diagrams. But how does it work?
(This meeting was based on an underground mathematics lesson, Fawn Nguyen’s post and Michael Lawler’s videos. Thank you all!)
I started the meeting by showing the group the Picture This! web site that turns pairs of numbers into a diagram visualization. I asked for a volunteer to give me two numbers, each less than 10. The first suggestion was 3 & 7. I entered the number into Picture This and this diagram was returned.
Factor Towers
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.
Launch
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.
Carl’s Basketball Problem
With a simple set up, CAMI enters a rabbit hole of notice/wonder and number patterns.
At our meeting, we worked on two tasks that I got last summer at a gathering of teachers from the K-12 system called NYC Twitter Math Camp.
The first is an activity teachers can use to develop group problem-solving norms with students. Continue reading “Carl’s Basketball Problem”