The first assignment for 7A was looking at YouCube's Activity, "Number Visuals," from the 1st Inspirational Week of Math in 2015. The class was given the image below to look at and make as many observations as they could.
The class found all sorts of patterns and relationships between the shapes. Here are some of their findings:
- All the prime numbers are circles.
- Every 4th figure is a group of squares.
- All multiples of three are triangles
- The first row are building blocks for the rest of the chart.
- Starting at 6; when you go down 2 and left 2, you will arrive at a variant of the number.
- You can see the factor of a composite number in the shapes that make up the number.
The group was challenged on who to describe how to move around the chart without using world like diagonal.
As an extension, the class was charged with figuring out what the 40th figure would look like. The class shared their different ideas (see one student's work above) and they had to defend one of the choices.
Students are learning to support their ideas and answers with solid evidence and reasoning. This will be an ongoing work in progress, all year long.
As we start off the school year in 6th and 7th grade, the students jump start their brains with an eight-day run of multiplication math facts practice. As a way to add a little fun to necessary skill practice, we let off some steam by doing target practice with our crumpled up mad minute sheets. We keep track of the number of shots made. There was a healthy level of competition on which class did better on the paper shooting.
This is LO's analysis of the shooting scores for both 6C and 7B. She was methodical and very clear in her process of showing how to convert the fraction into a decimal by division and then converting the decimal into the percent. It is a wonderful example of how to show your thinking and process.
The students were asked to determine which class "won." They came up with several different ways to to do their data analysis. Please ask your child to tell you all the different ways the data was processed!
