Cycling Back to the Beginning
It’s the last week before the holiday break. When I teach grade nine math my goal is to always wrap up the teaching of curriculum before the break. I do this for two reasons. First, so that we can spend two weeks engaging in review activities to help prepare for the final exam, which in this case is the EQAO. The second reason is so that we can play around with a final performance task that is a bit more open than usual. I had no idea if this plan would hold up now that our grade nine course team was trying a blend of project based learning. When I step back and think about what our team has accomplished over these four months, I’m pretty pleased. We started the semester with a question that was very loosely defined, “Can we teach Grade Nine Math using projects?”. We took a risk and dove in. After playing with Barbie Bungee , Dandy Candies and some intentionally frustrating algebra problems we decided on our next focus: We wanted t...