Week 8 - Math, Art and Food

The 7th graders participated in blended lessons this week to learn how to compare and order rational numbers... WITHOUT calculators! One of the reasons that we are such huge fans of blended lessons is that every student is engaged in the instruction and note taking. Look at the picture below, EVERYONE is engaged! They have the ability to pause the instruction (video), rewind and rewatch until it makes sense. This is also a great way for our students to practice note-taking, at their own pace. 

One of the follow-up activities included artwork. We have some very creative students this year that really excel with creative projects. Students were tasked to create a picture using a variety of colors. Then they had to determine the equivalent fraction, decimal and percents for each color (number of squares) they used in their pictures.

Food was the theme this week with the 8th graders. We started our unit on solving multi-step equations. When I say multi-step I mean MULTI step....6, 7, 8+ steps. In the past, this has been a unit that students typically struggle with due to all of the steps and the exceptions to the procedure. We decided to break down each step, spending a few days on each step to really reinforce each small part of the process. We started with learning how to combine like terms. In order to make it memorable, we incorporated "Lucky Charms' into the lesson. The students sorted the marshmallows in order to identify like terms, determine which marshmallows could be combined, etc.

After mastering combining like terms, the students moved on to the Distributive Property. For the intro, we used everyone's favorite fast food restaurant McDonald's (truth be told I much prefer Chic-Fila or Chipotle but McDonald's works better for the lesson and all the students are familiar with it).We used value meals to help show how numbers are distributed. Breaking down the steps seems to have helped. Now we just have to work on making sure the students avoid careless mistakes (those pesky negatives).