Saturday, October 22, 2011

That's A Bunch of Crap! --math activity

Recently I blogged about my love for YummyMath. I downloaded and tweaked this activity and then used it in my classroom about a week ago. Basically, I changed the names of the couple, changed the title, and added new captions for the graphic to make it more interesting to my students (things like "dude" and "you trippin"...they thought it was funny.) I changed the title to "That's a Bunch of Crap!" because we aren't really close to either mother's or father's day at this point in the year. The kids instantly loved the title and so I had at least a little bit of their attention from the start of the activity.

Just as a note, we have not talked about graphing linear equations and certainly haven't talked about solving a system of equations yet at this point. We have (in the form of games) taken information from tables and put it into an equation. So I was extremely pleased to see how this turned out (even though not every poster is perfect--trust me, I do notice some mathematical/grammatical errors in some of the posters). Enjoy!








Thursday, October 20, 2011

YummyMath

So I have recently discovered (or rediscovered, I'm not sure...) YummyMath. I L.O.V.E. this website. So here is my attempt at a review:

Overview: The website contains activities arranged by math subject (geometry, algebra I, etc...). The activities are all relevant and pretty current. For example, the first posting today is about the wall street protests.

Pros: Just about every time I have searched for a particular topic, I have found something usable. The activities are easy to download/edit/print. The students have loved every activity I have used so far from YummyMath. The hard work is already done. Most lessons come ready to print and implement.

Cons: Other than the major subject (geometry, algebra I, etc...) there isn't much organization as far as topic is concerned. As best I can tell it is arranged by date posted. Therefore, in order to find something you want to use it can take a while sometimes.

Overall: The good far outweighs the bad. I will continue to use YummyMath to make math relevant to my students. I would gladly recommend this to a friend.