Classroom Activities
Day 1-Pre-Assessment and Brainstorming with K-W-L
Students will have 10 minutes to think and write independently about the Giantburgers task, which assesses their ability to reason with large numbers, as well as to evaluate the validity of mathematical claims. The thrust of this task is to encourage students to be critical consumers of information to better see the connection of math to their everyday lives.
Think-Pair-Share is a strategy that encourages students to take time to think before answering a question, and it also holds them accountable knowing that they must share their thinking with, at a minimum, a partner. Students, especially in the middle grades, are often hesitant to share their thinking to open-ended questions, which leads to a few students engaging with the teacher while the others are able to zone out. Learning is a participatory sport, so it is essential in a unit like this for all students to be engaged in order for them to benefit from the content and skills being developed throughout the unit. As Harvey (1999) points out, other benefits of this strategy include:
- Providing "think time" increases quality of student responses.
- Students become actively involved in thinking about the concepts presented in the lesson.
- Research tells us that we need time to mentally "chew over" new ideas in order to store them in memory. When teachers present too much information all at once, much of that information is lost. If we give students time to "think-pair-share" throughout the lesson, more of the critical information is retained.
- When students talk over new ideas, they are forced to make sense of those new ideas in terms of their prior knowledge. Their misunderstandings about the topic are often revealed (and resolved) during this discussion stage.
- Students are more willing to participate since they don't feel the peer pressure involved in responding in front of the whole class.
After thinking and writing about their own ideas, students will pair with a peer at their tables to discuss what they wrote in an effort to clarify their thinking and prepare to share whole class. Before pairs begin, we will set the focus for their five-minute discussions on reasoning, or supporting their claims with evidence and thinking. As a whole group, after pairs have had time to discuss, we will chart thinking about the task with an emphasis on how students made their decisions based on the information provided. I will lead students to consider what information would have been useful to know in order to make a more informed decision.
From here, I will introduce our unit of study on energy and food by giving students an overview of the five areas of food they will choose from: waste, bottled water, school lunch, where food comes from and what to eat, fast food. The K-W-L strategy will be used for this segment of the lesson. We will brainstorm what we know and want to know about each of these five areas, leaving the learned column blank for students to add to as they discover new information during their research.
Day 2- Analyzing What We Eat through Data Collection
Students will be introduced to the Personal Food Audit template where they will record what they eat for a week and identify problems they see in their own diets that fall into one of the five categories we are studying. I will model this process with a day from my diet, showing students how to use the template as well as questions I asked myself to determine areas I could make changes in my diet. Students will use a second day's sample from my diet to analyze in groups. We will share and discuss, as well as answer any questions students have about the process. We will chart a list of questions to ask when analyzing data.
Students will then work on analyzing nutrition labels. Groups will be given different labels to summarize. Some will have single serving products, while others will contain multiple servings. Groups will share their summaries while displaying the labels and as a class we will discuss misconceptions that would be common if we didn't read labels with a critical eye.
Days 3-30* Book Clubs, Skill Building, and PSA Development
(*We have shifted to double periods, so time may vary)
The structure of students' book clubs will stem from their interests and abilities; after forming groups based on the problems they are investigating, they will develop a schedule for reading and discussion that incorporates the shared book they read along with their personal research and articles I share with them via our class portal. Students will have the autonomy to use their books as resources or as cover-to-cover reads as they see fit.
Building an annotated bibliography will be one of our skill focus points during book clubs, and mini-lessons will be delivered at the start of class periods to help students navigate this new world. I will employ the use of www.bibme.org, a free web-based tool for students to keep track of their sources. Once they have their list of sources, we will work on brief annotations to describe how they used each source.
Math skills will span broadly across the content strands of ratio and proportion, data analysis, and expressions and equations. Process skills will include communicating mathematical data for a variety of reasons, problem solving, reasoning and proof, and representing data. I will deliver daily mini-lessons on these topics, and formative assessments will be administered throughout the unit. The use of MARS tasks will be integral, as their analytical rubrics assess the skill at various levels of understanding. I have listed the tasks that will be used in the Appendix.
Throughout the research period, students will meet with me individually to ask questions, check in and allow time for individualized instruction in areas of need. Data from the formative assessments, as well as student requests, will be used to determine the order and frequency of these meetings. The goal of this time is for students to think more specifically about their topic of research rather than the general skills involved. There will be a huge emphasis on connecting the mathematics to their real-world issues, as this is an area of deficit in our curriculum; students have trouble seeing the connections between math and the world around them.
As students gather information, it will be important for them to organize it with their final product of a Public Service announcement in mind. I have created a storyboard template for them to use to help with the flow of their presentation. They will consider questions such as: Who is my audience? How should my audience's attention be grabbed? Which information is most important and easily understood by the general public? What action will my audience take as a result of this information?
Our technology teacher will help students with the technical aspects of creating their PSAs. We plan to use Windows Movie Maker along with iMovie to develop these videos, and students have varying levels of experience and comfort with each. One of the most valuable resources students will receive is time and space to work; they need to have a balance of receiving and processing the plethora of information coming at them.
During the last week of the project, students will spend their entire time on production of their PSAs and infographics. Daily sharing of progress will take place, along with peer critique. As students become experts on different aspects of the process, they will deliver the mini-lessons that start class to share that knowledge with their classmates. Both the technology coordinator and I will be assisting students, and their work will be documented using a flip camera. I will post daily blog posts about their progress.
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