Reflection of Rich Activity & Lesson Plan

Creating rich, group-worthy activities to share with our math methods class was a very interesting experience. I have not yet truly thought about whether or not activities that I might implement in my future classroom are rich and group-worthy activities. In short, I believe that this means that the activities students are doing are both meaningful to students and utilize meaningful mathematics, not just utilizing simple calculations to find answers. Our rich activity was called kaboom money sticks. In this activity, students drew popsicle sticks with coins attached to them from a bin, and counted their coins to report a value to their group members. Then, their group members would either agree or disagree with that value. Additionally, students were keeping track of each of their turns by writing the value they found and drawing corresponding pictures of coins to represent that value. This activity was rich in content because it involved multiple modes of learning. Small group, whole group, and individual work were utilized throughout this activity. In addition, students were not just counting coins. They were getting feedback from their other group members, and also writing down their values and the corresponding coins to those values. At the end of the activity, students ordered their values from least to greatest and also identified their highest and lowest values. Students also talked about how they could have spent their money.

The two other groups also had great rich, group-worthy activities that were shared with the class! One group had a surface area tin-man activity. Small groups were give various objects, such as spheres, cones, or cylinders. Then, they were given the formula for the surface area of that object. Using rulers, students were to find the surface area of each object. Then, they would report their findings to the teachers and receive some tin foil. The task was to cover the objects in tin foil with no extra space or leftovers. I thought this was a really cool activity. It had students doing math operations, but also allowed students to be creative. Additionally, it gave students a visual in order to aid in their understanding of the topic. Surface area can be a tricky concept for students to grasp, and this activity was a great solution to that. The other group did an activity for middle schoolers involving ratios and rates. This was another very interesting and interactive activity. Basically, students were to measure different body parts of a Barbie doll or G.I. Joe Then, they were to create a scale drawing of the figure as if it were a human. We did these drawings on floor-to-ceiling whiteboards. This activity was super interactive and hands on, and I really enjoyed it myself. I think it would be very effective in a classroom, if students could be appropriate enough to respectfully complete the task. Both of these activities were very rich in content and group-worthy, in my eyes.