Grandpa Helpful

The Review Task for Year 9 this week gave them a packing problem. The scenario was that their grandfather was moving into a retirement village and needed to work out the cheapest way to move his furniture, in a single trip.

They were given the dimensions of the furniture in inches and the dimensions of the transport vehicles in centimetres. They were told to spend a maximum of 30 minutes on their solution.

Most students were able to draw a conclusion in the allocated time. Interestingly one student calculated the volume of the items and that of the delivery vehicles and made their decision based on these calculations.

Enquiry based learning

This week I have been encouraged to use more enquiry based learning in my classes.

Year 10 were studying Graphs of Physical Phenomena. The task was to work in pairs and use the mini-whiteboards to draw the graph of a paper aeroplane or scrunched piece of paper as it was thrown. The resulting graphs ranged from straight lines if the plane was thrown towards the ground, a parabolic arch if the plane was thrown upwards and an interesting wobble or undescribable path if the wind managed to intercept the trajectory. The students were engaged and understood the speed of the plane at various points of the graph.

Year 11 are studying Single Data Sets which is riddled with terminology. I designed a set of dominoes with the term and a graph or definition on each domino (piece of paper). The term and graph were on different dominoes. The students worked together and derived the correct order of the tiles. It was a helpful way of revising the work. At the end of the session I gave each student a miniature version of the dominoes for future revision.

Dominoes are an easy way to revise or reinforce any topic. I have made them on numerous occasions.