I don't know about your students, but ours have been slightly off-kilter for the last week. I've sensed the Holiday Fever building to a slight frenzy since Halloween. (I'm going to blame the advertising and early onset of Christmas decorations in the store before the temperatures dipped below 90 degrees here in Tucson.) Keeping their attention during November and December is a monumental feat. Holiday here, vacation day there, and, of course, next week we have two days of benchmark testing which enables us to have 30-minute classes for two days. (Translation: ....just keep swimming, Nemo)
How do I keep my students engaged and learning? Yesterday I put together a lesson that caught their attention from start to finish. It came together about 4 a.m. yesterday morning. That's usually when I can meet with my professional development team and brainstorm lesson ideas. It all started with Robert Kaplinsky and this photo. Robert has an amazing collection of lessons that inspire me. The key is engagement so that students are pulled into a lesson and are hooked into the math!
As soon as my students saw this picture on the screen, they were buzzing. We launched into a Notice/Wonder activity. They didn't want to stop! I then played the MasterCard Showdown video that Robert posted with this lesson.
While his lesson went on to create a table of data and then an equation for the function, we spun off into ratios.
"Joey Chestnut of San Jose, CA, holds the world record for eating 69 Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs and Buns in 10 minutes, and he will seek his seventh straight title this year – a world record.Sonya Thomas of Alexandria, VA, will defend her title as Female Champion.She consumed 45 Hot Dogs and Buns in 10 minutes last year, setting a new women’s world record."
The kids were truly amazed. A few girls were just mortified at the thought of eating even one hot dog in 10 minutes. One boy shot out, "Why would a girl do that?" I then had students work with a partner to answer the following:
What is the ratio of hot dogs and buns that Joey can eat to the hot dogs and buns that Sonya can eat? (quick check on writing ratios correctly)
How many hot dogs can each person eat in 5 minutes? 1 minute? 60 minutes?
As always, there is a surprise in every lesson for me. I didn't think this was a particularly difficult task, and I wondered if it was actually too straightforward. It would give some additional practice with division, multiplication and decimals. Bonus!
The surprise was the number of students who wanted to divide by 5 to find the number of hot dogs eaten in 5 minutes, the number of students who had no idea what to divide by to find the number of hot dogs in 1 minute or wanted to divide by 9, and the number of students who had no idea where to begin on 60 minutes. As I wandered the room each period during this task, I had the opportunity to ask students to explain why they wanted to divide by 5 or 9. Very interesting responses. By continuing the line of questioning, most of them could understand the relationship between these numbers. Finding 1 minute's worth of hot dogs consumed was most baffling. Some students were reluctant to give a decimal answer and wanted to round to the next whole number. Would that be fair in a competition? Haven't you ever eaten a half a sandwich and left the rest?
Each class worked the entire time on this task - only stopping when we had the bell nipping at our heels. We will be revisiting this task today with discussion and also move onto ways to display the data (tables, graphs, diagrams) in order to solve future ratio problems.
Thanks, team, for a great lesson that provoked thinking and some formative assessment on proportional reasoning. Have a great Thanksgiving and try not to gobble til you wobble!
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