During the first to second week of school we started a set of assignments called the Week of Inspirational math. We did four actives the entire week and each needed teamwork and brain power to figure out the activities. Each activity took about forty minutes to two hours. Every activity came with a video one to three minutes each. They each has an inspirational message but I must warn the videos are a bit cheesy with okay acting but the message is clear. It tells its okay to be slow at math, it's okay if you don't get the problem.
The first activity was trying to make shapes with a rope tied together. It may seem simple but the teachers acted as a skeptics. So we had to find ways to convince the shape was the actual shape. It was terrible but made you think more. The second activity was stacking pennies. We had to find different ways of stacking the pennys in these different groups. We had one hundred pennies and we had possibly infinity ways to stack. Our group was the first to finish and ended up doing there more. The third activity was trying to cut out a Triangle with a piece of patty paper. It was frustrating, you couldn't use the corner and you only had one cut. Not multiple cuts going in the same direction but just one! And it was irritating. Maybe two people found out how to do it but many of us struggled like me. But still it was very fun. The fourth activity was an activity with squares. There was a rectangle was in front of you with squares drawn in them. You were trying to find as many squares as possible. The first square had 17 squares and the second had 20 squares. Surprisingly enough I actually didn't find 20 squares the first time looking at it. I only found 18 but A classmate of mine showed me a 3 x 3 square I totally didn't even think about. |
Two habits we used from habits of a mathematician. We used Starting small and collaborate and listen. How we used them was with stating out small, We used the starting small with the stacking pennies activity. When making the different shapes we needed to find possible ways to use all one hundred pennies. With collaborating and listening we had to use that for every one of our activities. When dealing with groups everyone has voices and thoughts and ideas it can get kinda complicated time to time.