Summer and Beyonce both have the Friday Five thinking about lemonade. But
lemonade requires lemons, and the Friday Five has no such thing in its
archives. No lemons at all. Peaches and bananas this week, but no lemons. Read
on!
Polygraph: Parabolas, Part 2
Here’s an activity that answers a question. The question is What do I do the day after my students play Polygraph? An important feature of Polygraph is that it elicits students’ informal ideas about math objects before naming and defining those ideas. Polygraph: Parabolas, Part 2 is a model for formalizing some of those ideas in a seamless way that capitalizes on the context of the original game. We’re working on part 2 activities for several other Polygraphs, so stay tuned!
How Many Peaches?
Michael Fenton brings us this nectarine…er…plum….no…peach! of an activity. It’s short and sweet and gives students a chance to show their thinking about multiplication and addition structure. This kind of work—whether it takes place in Activity Builder or not—is essential to the visual patterns work that is so fun and so popular in algebra classrooms.
Picture Perfect Parabolas
Jemma Sherwood has students graphing a banana (you read that right), three bridges and a fountain. This all provides great fodder for conversations about what it means for a parabola to be the right curve for the job. Is each of these sort of parabolic or actually a parabola for a good reason?
The Integer Game
Andrew Stadel has hacked a bit of pseduo-randomness into this Activity Builder-based game. Gather students in twos or threes on each device as they try to maximize their integer sums. Will Fawn be victorious over Andrew? Find out in between your own rounds of The Integer Game.
Sketchy Derivatives
Last week, the Friday Five shared Sketchy Parabolas. This week, it’s Sketchy Derivatives. Each of these activities takes advantage of the new sketch feature in Activity Builder to get students thinking and working informally before committing to formal and precise mathematical methods.
There you have it! A diverse collection of both activities and fruits. Now where’s that lemonade?