It’s the end of the year and your kids are dreaming of summer. It’s hard enough to keep them in their seat much less quite, right? Time to do something different and hopefully fun. How about learning their multiplication tables (or how to add) in Greek!
Our number symbols is taken from the Arabic number symbols, but here is the Greek equivalent. And here is a site of all Greek Numbers 1-999
Arabic number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Greek numbers :
The Greeks “had different symbols for 1,2,3 up to 9, just like us. However, they did not use the same symbols to represent numbers greater than 9. They had a new set of symbols for 10, 20, 30, and so on, and yet another set for 100, 200, 300. This has the disadvantage, like so many of the ancient counting systems, that you eventually ran out of symbols!”
The goal of this project is for your students to create a Greek multiplication table like the following helping solidify their own multiplication understanding.
I'm really proud of the work David Martin is doing over at Real Teaching Means Real Learning! Recently instead of having his college kids suffer through another boring test covering trigonometric functions, he decided to pose a challenge. The video above is one of the student results!
The following workbook offers a great way of teaching proportions with the theme of grasshoppers. The initial question asks If a grasshopper were your size how far could he jump?
Though my profession is teaching mathematics, in the summers, when I'm only teaching part-time at my college, I run a lawn mowing business. Like any business I must calculate my profit by subtracting my costs from my revenue. I think this type of analysis would make a good class project. The goal is simply to getting them thinking about how many variables can go into an equation, though depending on the time you put into the project you could make it a competition or a game or simply a problem. Again, my goal would be to get kids talking in the language of algebra
Ask your students to list all the possible costs that could be incurred in a lawn mowing business and write them on the overhead.
Next, give each student a budget (say $1,000) that they must buy a mower and/or market their business. Next, build an equation to calculate the revenue (R) and costs (C)
P = R - C
C = Fuel, mower, marketing (flyers, adds in the paper, etc)
R = pay per lawn
You could make your profit equation as detailed as you would like, listing as many costs and types of revenue as you would like. You could have kids make flyers for their business, listing the equation on the flyer. Some students may take such knowledge and start their own lawn service. Nevertheless, it's a good introduction to the language and applicability of algebra
I love looking at architecture. There's something so therapeutic about the symmetry.
In this exercise your goal as the educator is to get students thinking about how to take an area of an irregular shape. The shapes that you will use are extremely advanced
So the goal is not for your students to take exact areas but to develop the thought process of how to approach such a problem.
Tell your students that they need to know how much paint to buy to paint the front of this house. How can they figure out the area? Print out the picture and have them spot as many regular shapes as possible in the picture, like so
From here we could get a close approximation of the area of the front of the house if we knew the measurements.
Students often find little use for their equations. Here is an equation that has some more applicability. What is the true costs of a speeding ticket.
It's easy to estimate the initial costs of a ticket by paying the fine, but it takes some math to tell the true costs of a ticket
Let the total costs of the ticket be represented by the letter C
Let the costs of the actual ticket be represented by the letter T
Let the anual costs of increased insurance be represented by the letters IC
Let the years be represented by ht e letter t
C = T + IC(t)
John gets a ticket for speeding in a school zone. The ticket itself is $110.00. John calls his insurance to notify them and upon doing so figures out that his monthly insurance plan has been raised by $23. What is the total costs of the ticket over the next 10 years?
It is believed that Archamendes wrote in the sand before he wrote on paper (papyrus). I've even read that Archamendes carried with him a box of sand at all times offering him the ability to work on mathematics from anywhere. I believe there is merit in this method. I would encourage you to take your students outside before the school year is over, to the nearest sandbox (or my case, mud) and conduct class with a stick.
As customary for my vacations i enjoy visiting the schools to witness learning in process. Here in the town of Gracias i set in on a mathematics class for 10th grade boys.
The class began at 4:30pm in order to allow the teenage students to work in the morning. The uniforms are customary for all public and private schools here in Honduras. Today, in 95 degree weather with no air conditioning and no textbooks (they aren't affordable) we learned matrix addition.
My family and I will be out of the country for a couple of weeks without much internet. Will post some new ideas soon enough as well as tell you about my upcoming radio show. Please let me know what topics you would be interested in discussing on the show
All the best in education,
Jeremiah Dyke
1) A medium size picture of a world map 2) A picture of the map of Australia 3) A picture of the map of the United States 4) A picture of the map of the state of New York 5) A picture of the map of The City of New York 6) A picture of the map of Time Square within New York City
Students will cut out each picture paste them to the worksheet labeling each part real, rational, irrational, integer, whole and natural like so.
The point of this task is to establish the fact that specific numbers can be both
You can download these in the Math downloads section
Operation Rocky--You Vs. The Test! First things first, you must hype of this exercise! You have to sell it! More on this below.
The goal of this project is for students to train for their big upcoming fight (the state test). To do this they must go through daily fights via daily 2-4 question quizzes.
Each day you will give a lecture about an upcoming topic for their state test, at the end of the class each student will take a 2-4 question quiz with a picture of the guy they are fighting for that day. At the end of class, you tally of the grades and mark on a poster if the student won or loss with tally marks How to plan:
You might not have enough time to re-cover every topic on the test, so pick the top 5-10.
How to introduce the project and make it successful
This is huge! Your kids should be pumped to take on these quizzes, how do you do this?
1st Go out and buy the Rocky soundtrack or at least the theme song and play it everyday during this exercise.
2nd Have students come up with their own fight name Mr. "Mountain-do-the-Dew" Dyke!
3rd Have posters made listing each students name and their fight name with two columns wins and losses
4th Each quiz should have a pic of who they are fighting
Finally, just to give you an overall idea, i would walk around the class punching kids in the arm, allowing kids to punch their quizzes, screaming "Are YOU READY!", doing pushups, jogging in place screaming "we won't go down without a fight". For most this is too over the top
One thing i would redo, is to allow rematches for each quiz
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