MTBoS Week 1 Challenge Favorite Problem

One of my many favorite problems to pose to my class is the Locker Problem.  There are many versions of it on line, and you can also find some tech tools for use in the class.   I pose the problem to my students and then give them a few minutes to accomplish steps one and two of the 4 step problem solving approach.  After a little while we talk about what strategies the students have chosen.  Draw a picture always comes up and through discussion we determine we don't want to draw 1000 lockers so we whittle it down to trying a simpler problem and looking for a pattern.  After a little more time to work on the problem we talk about some other ways we can solve the problem and all of a sudden the students start getting creative!  Some students use a deck of cards to represent lockers, some use puzzle pieces, some use pairs of scissors and some actually go to our 6th grade locker bay with colored post it notes.  Eventually they begin to see a pattern emerge.  I have the students present their work to the class and we review the pattern if necessary using the interactive hundreds chart on the Smartboard. 

Here's the problem from CMP: 

 

There are 1,000 lockers in the long hall of Westfalls High. In preparation for the beginning of school, the janitor cleans the lockers and paints fresh numbers on the locker doors. The lockers are numbered from 1 to 1,000. When the 1,000 Westfalls High students return from summer vacation, they decide to celebrate the beginning of the school year by working off some energy.

• Student 1 opens every locker.
• Student 2 either opens or closes every other locker.
• Student 3 opens or closes every third locker. And so on, ...

Tour of Room 610

What the students see as they walk into room 610:

Totally stolen from Pinterest

 My cart with individual white boards.  How can you teach math without them? But, my favorite are the group white boards cut by the friendly guy at Lowes (full sheets cut in half).  They cover 4 desktops perfectly and allow for large print when sharing work with the whole class.

 I love having plants in my classroom, and it's the perfect spot for my Roger Federer and Bryan Brothers posters.

 My advisory is made up of 18 5th through 8th graders and we meet the first 25 minutes of each day.  We also have an all day community service day in the fall and an all day activity day in the spring.  I love starting my day with these awesome students!  We named our group "Wix's Wildfire."  Last year we tie-dyed cool shirts and then screened our logo onto them. 

 Our building is just a few years old and our administrator wanted ALL of the walls painted white.  Along with the white ceilings and white flecked tile floors it feels very institutional!  My students do a scale drawing activity in the spring and the huge posters are perfect for adding color to the walls for the beginning of the next year.


Open House is the only time of year my desk will look this organized!

And finally, our class mascot, Bert, the farting Hippo.  (It is, after all, middle school!)

Best thing to happen this week.

We just finished our first full week of school.  My class routine is catching on for my 6th graders.  I like to start most days with an Estimation 180 picture and discussion.  The students are enjoying the challenge and they are doing a better job of talking about their thinking each day.

Each year my team of teachers take our 3 classes to the nearby park during lunch and recess for a "getting to know you" picnic.  It's our chance to see who has made new friends, what students hang out together and what students appear to be left out.  When a group of students finished lunch they asked to go across the way to play kickball.  I offered to supervise them, and off we went.  When we got to the ball field, there was a huge pile of sand right on the pitchers mound.  The die-hard kickball fans decided to play around the pile.  One of my students went up to the mound, scooped up a handful of sand and said, "Hey Mrs. Wix, how many grains of sand do you think are in my hand?  How many grains in the whole pile?  We can make our own estimation 180 questions!"  FIST-BUMP!  We followed up with a conversation on how we could come up with a reasonable estimate.  Talking math... during recess... on a Friday afternoon! 

Writing them down makes them so much more official!

Okay, I have 30 minutes until I need to leave for our big weekend tennis tournament. I have been mulling over my goals for the year all summer, but here is where I need to make them official.

 1)  Work on establishing positive relationships with my students and parents very early in the year. 

2)   Include problem solving in my class tons more than I do- and reflect on the problem solving through my blog.

3)  Venture into SBG (ala Rick Wormeli)- work completion will be recorded for parent communications, but the grades will be based on showing mastery of the standards.  This one really scares me- but in my heart I know it is what is best for the student learning.

4)    Finish out my appointed position as District 1 Director for MCTM and run for another term.  I’ve never run for an office before so I’m a bit nervous about this.  At my very first meeting one of the other board members said to me that the meetings and MCTM conference participation was her “chance to soar with the eagles.”  I really appreciate the dedicated math leaders in our state and I am learning, growing professionally and loving my time soaring!

5)    Present at our Spring MCTM conference.  I want to have at least 2 relevant topics that will have meaningful activities for participants.  

   This is definitely a full plate... but I think with the work I've put in over the summer and the support network I have, it is achievable.  

Round 2

I had such high goals for my blogging self last year and very little success. Unexpected challenges came up and my goals had to change.  I always tell my sixth graders it's important to be flexible, so it was a good reminder for myself.   THIS YEAR will be different.  I received an email from Julie Reulbach, whose blog I have been following this past year ( ispeakmath.wordpress.com ).  It was an invitation for posts in the MS Sunday Funday on icebreakers.  I got this request amid all of the posts from TMC13 recap posts and I was once again motivated.  Thank you Julie for taking the time for the email and invitation to join this group.

Onto my icebreaker. I remember my first days of school as a student- sitting in desks doing very little talking and hearing about all the rules and expectations.  Well... the teachers were talking, but I probably missed most of what they were saying because I was the student who would rather be "doing."  My activity for my 6th grade math classes this year will be a data collection activity.  The link has a sample of questions geared toward adults, but I will throw in more that relate to middle schoolers.  You cut out the questions and tape one on each student's back with the idea that no one will tell them what the question is on their back.  Each student receives a data collection sheet and walks around the room recording the answers that everyone gives them.  They must also answer the questions that the other students have taped to their backs.  When all the answers are recorded, the students need to come up with two possible questions that would make sense of the data they collected.

I'm excited about this activity for a number of reasons:
*  The students will be up, moving around and talking to everyone else in the room.
*  I'll get an idea of the class's ability to estimate and their number sense based on some of the answers.
*  I will have 26 (or however many students I have in the class) sets of data that I can use throughout the year.  I plan on collecting the sheets and using them to make graphs, look for patterns and find measures of central tendencies.

Will I learn a lot about the students from this activity?  Probably not, that is why they will have a "Getting to Know You" survey as their homework for the first night.  Will the students get to know me?  I hoping they will get a taste of what math class will be like this year- we'll  be getting out of our seats, talking to each other about numbers and requiring participation from everyone.  I'd say that will be a very successful lesson for the first day of school!


Update:  here are the questions I have for the fist day this year.  I decided to print them out on labels so that it will be quicker to pass out and then I will be able to easily stick them to the collected data sheets.


Do You Know What You are Asking? PDF
What size shoe do you wear?  Word Doc