It’s been a great week, and a rough week. The highlight was having my pre-algebra students experience the Distance Between Two Points task. I discovered it among a collection of tasks at the Complex Instruction Consortium website. I tweaked it a bit, and what I really liked about the task was that it got the students out of the classroom. They liked that too. In fact at some point I lost “visual contact” with every student but they never took advantage of the situation!
Students were anxious to get started, so many didn’t pay attention to the directions we read aloud.
Student: “I don’t get it!”
“Read the Resource Fact.”
“So we have to count the tiles?”
“Is that what the resource fact is suggesting?”
Student: “But how do we find AC and BD?”
To give you an idea of the layout of our building here’s what the kids were doing. I did NOT give them this diagram. They had to come up with it on their own, which was extremely helpful when describing the group’s procedure.
Here’s an example of the student work. They’re getting better at constructing an argument and explaining their reasoning.
Curiouser and Curiouser 