Following @duinok’s lead, in her Favorite First Day of School post – I checked out Dan Meyer’s Graphing Stories to use as an intro to my first unit. We viewed 8 of his videos – I asked students to sketch what they thought was the correct graph, then in a different color / style of line – I gave them time to sketch the “correct” graph. We folded our Graphing Stories sheet and entered attached it to our INB on a RHP. Within the discussions, we addressed choosing good intervals - a reminder of things our graphs should include from axes labels to titles. It was a great review of good graphing techniques without actually “reviewing” – students were actually doing.
On the LHP, students were asked to write a brief reflection of their graphing experiences. The second part to the assignment was one I held my breath on… would they actually do it.
Create your own video / story. Include a graph to model it.
The next day, I shared a scoring guide with them. We talked about reasonable deadlines – I passed around a sheet and they chose their due dates. With only a handful – who came to meet when they were not going to be able to meet their deadline, they were anxious to turn them in.
Several chose to write a story – but many of them made videos – I had a student running up the side of a house – sitting for a moment before jumping back to the ground (yes, it was interesting), another student running at different rates, someone tossing a ball back and forth in a store, a student doing a standing back tuck, a student swimming laps in a pool. These are only a handful of videos I saw – but this was exactly what I wanted – students taking something of interest to them and connecting it to math.
My plan is to attach their graphs to the LHP. I have smiled & laughed a lot while watching their videos.
