Here are some results from my Grade 7 and Grade 9 math pop-up books! They are really fantastic. Up side: The kids were really excited about the project and doing good math all the way through the last week of the year, even though it was not graded. One kid even said she wishes she had been able to finish the book before her family packed all their stuff for their move. (No worries though; I'll make sure I mail it to her.) The down side: tomorrow's the last full school day and I'm still not done giving last-minute feedback on all these Grade 7 books. I plan on getting to school early tomorrow to finish mistake-searching on all of them, and then give the kids 40 minutes in class to help each other fix them before they take them home for good -- but, fixing on our last day!! What a rush job. :( But, they've already done a terrific job and most of them have only very small fixes still to make tomorrow. I think it's doable. Crazy ambitious of me though! I hope next year, if I repeat the same project, I'll have to be smarter about pacing it as to avoid all this end-of-year stress.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/averyseriousmimi/sets/72157630208077148/
PS. This post is a follow up to this post where I had conceived the idea and written a bit to include the project descriptions. If I were to do this again though, I'd re-work the project description to include the phases of the project:
Phase 1. Gather at least 4 problems per topic, of appropriate difficulty. Need to sufficiently address all listed sub-topics with these problems. (2 to 3 days)
Phase 2. Write rough-draft explanations and get them reviewed by the teacher. (3 to 4 days)
Phase 3. Start to build the book. Get the first pages checked to make sure format of "pop-up" is actually useful and interactive. (3 days)
Phase 4. Peer review, followed by teacher review, for mistakes in arithmetic or algebra. (1 day)
Phase 5. Fix the parts of the book as necessary. (1 day)
What a fantastic idea - terrific revision. Just to clarify: did you do this mostly as in-class work, or was it an assignment to do over the holiday?
ReplyDeleteIn case you haven't seen it - this might be interesting to you: http://www.youblisher.com/p/110482-Teaching-Mathematics-with-Foldables/
thanks! And actually, that was the foldables book I had looked up as well for ideas!
ReplyDeleteOh, and we did it mostly during class, but they had to finish parts of it at home over the weekend. Altogether it took about 2 to 3 weeks of class time (after grades closed for the year).
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