Musings from Mrs. Galvan

Unlike my inspiration for class today, Mr. Kraft , I love doing review games! But I do get bored by doing the same ones over and over.  My students got really into Zombie Grudge . I went low tech and wrote problems on cards, kept track of strikes on paper and displayed using the document camera. They were exposed to many different types of problems involving simplifying radicals and rationalizing denominators. Frankly, I think just using the mini white boards make them happy, but adding the elimination factor made it really fun. I was impressed by my students' abilities to have fun with this game without going too far and hurting feelings. Sure there were alliances and favoritism, but more importantly, there was fun and engagement. I try to have prizes for the winners on game days. Today the winners got to choose a prize from the grab bag. My grab bag is a bag of toys that my own kids (ages 2 and 4) get from the myriad of birthday parties we attend...

I have been enjoying reading Crazy Math Teacher Lady's blog a lot this year. This morning as I was perusing her latest posts, I read her post about speed dating as a way to mix up independent practice. I read her blog post at 8:02 am and my first algebra class was at 8:40 am. I scrambled to pull things together, I didn't do other things I was supposed to do, but I avoided a boring class. Here are the cards (I hand wrote answers on the back on one set). Students were invested in their problems. I started the lesson by talking about how speed dating is an efficient way for people looking for that special someone to have better odds at finding a match. Speed dating in math is a good choice for test prep in the same way as they will be exposed to a wider variety of problems and have the benefit of their classmates' coaching. For the how to on conducting this activity, check out Kate Nowak's directions here . Thank you Kate! The students really got into the dati...

Thank you to Square Root of -1 for the idea . Monday my Geometry kiddos will go on a Trig Scavenger Hunt. A colleague happened to have astrolabes ready to use and I happen to own many measuring tapes... so why not? Check out the prompt here . As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Here is the prompt . It is pretty basic. I am open to suggestions. I wanted to include a statement within geogebra that would change with the slider. Something like: If the radius of Circle A is ___ and the measure of Arc CC' is ___ then the arc length is ____. It was a little buggy when I tried it so I am not confident that I can sell my students on it. Here is the sample:

I have assigned a photo safari to my Geometry students for several years. The prompt is predictable: Go see geometry in the real world. Take at least 10 pictures of 10 different concepts we have learned this year. Present them alongside ten if-then definitions and label your pictures with diagrams. Initially I received photo albums, like actual photo albums. Last year I had students turning them in via prezi or tumblr (they have since removed their links) or power point (I know, very fancy). This year was my first year requiring all of my students to create a digital portfolio for math. As such, the geometry photo safari project blossomed (blog + awesome = blossom). Here is the prompt . Here are my favorite submissions for 2014: Nate - who also uses his blog to display his comical side Russell - who really got into the story side of things Sophie & Phoebe - who went the video route Lily - great, subtle sense of humor

I gave my students these directions to construct a parallelogram in a circle and discover the results. I did this waaaay last minute as I decided this morning that their traditional problem set was boring. Here is a sample that I made: Drag around point B to re-size the circle. Click anywhere on the circle and drag to move it so you can see. If anyone knows how to only publish the shape and not the algebra, let me know. :)