This week—in this holiday season—the Fave turns its attention to the amazing community of teachers using Desmos tools to support students in creative ways. Click through on each of these posts for great ideas, resources, and links.
In this lesson plan in the form of a blog post, Jenn Vadnais uses Desmos as an instructional tool to help students understand percents and proportions.
The other day a teacher asked me to create a lesson that had elements of a Number Talk involving percents. Her students had recently been discussing proportional reasoning and the constant of proportionality. Knowing this, I decided to combine percents and proportional reasoning with Desmos. Here’s the resulting lesson.
On his blog, Paul Jorgens combines several Desmos tools to support classroom conversations that help students develop mathematical vocabulary with increasing depth and sophistication.
If we are going to develop vocabulary through experiences, we need to build in those activities into our lessons. We try to utilize our “fire up” time to open the class.
Julie Reulbach writes about how she has her students create Desmos art. She supports their learning and project organization by having them complete their art inside a Desmos activity.
Having them do the project through an Activity Builder helped me manage all of their graphs so I could easily view them and access them for help. By using an Activity Builder, I was also able to include the instructions for the projects and helpful tips for them…I had them print out their Desmos Art, and I made a huge collage of it on my wall in the back of the room.
Supporting students with tools, language, and art—this week’s Friday
Fave.
Note: The Fave is taking a couple weeks off, and will see you again in the new year. All the best to you, your colleagues, students, and loved ones until then.