Here is the best 3-D project of this year! They call it a pencil rocket. It's made up of an octagonal prism, topped by an octagonal pyramid, with four right triangular-prism fins and a rectangular concavity. (They are going to put a picture of their friend inside the rocket concavity.) The kids calculated the volume and surface area of this thing they had designed, and made 2-D nets. The other projects are still rolling in slowly, but if any of them turn out to be amazingly cool, I'll post more pics!
And a few beautiful systems of equations project posters from my 8th-graders!
Heart.
The project madness goes on, however. I'm still manning hands-on projects in Grade 7 (a bunch of uber-cool patterns activities I got from my old Department Chair from NYC), culminating in a Buttons Sale. The kids will design their own buttons and write a business plan, and the principal and I will pick two plans, provide the seed money, divide the class into two groups, and see if they can actually make the profit they intended to make.
In Grade 8, we're doing the bungee jump project... which is always my favorite, except this year there is a bit of twist. The rubber bands I got from the school secretary for free are of low quality, so every time they do a new trial, they have to make a brand new rope with all new rubber bands to ensure the rope hasn't already been stretched out!!! I guess it's not too bad, considering they'll only be trying up to about 8 or 9 rubber bands before they do the regression/prediction and build the "for real" rope. But still! Definitely a twist I had not not anticipated from the past years' experiences of doing this project.
In Grade 11, I assigned as a semi out-of-class project for the students to work on the wonderful trig project from Kristen. (To be nice to them, I didn't mention that last year I had given the same trig project to my honors 9th-graders. Oh, how I miss those amazing 9th-graders!!) I've only given the kids one full day (80 minutes) to work on the problems in class, during which the class maintained that eerie silence for a while as they had to think hard about how to approach the problems. We'll see what final questions they will have tomorrow, and whether they can come up with all the correct numbers by next week!
Haha, what is the "wedding reception" poster about? My curiosity is piqued!
ReplyDeleteThe kids had to compare two deals for hosting wedding reception: One restaurant charges 2000 up front for renting the venue but only 80 per guest for the food. The other restaurant charges nothing for the venue but 100 per guest. So they have to find and analyze break-even points and stuff.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, Geoff and I are flying to Belize next week to plan our wedding!! I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll like what we see and so we can move on to other things like sending out Save the Dates!!
Ooh, good luck!! Belize, eh? :) That sounds amazing!
ReplyDeleteHow did you set up the last project listed? Did the students have to find the 2 deals to compare or did you give them a list of options?
ReplyDeleteI gave them two deals to compare. They had a bunch of different prompts, many of which have to do with comparing deals, but not all. Most groups had different prompts but were going through similar process. If you want, you can ping me on Twitter @untilnextstop and give me your email, and I'd be happy to dig up the resources for you.
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