Rational Numbers The Vanguard Way!

The Goal: Creating a STUDENT CENTERED classroom from day 1!

            Collaboration began from the first day of school with the cup stack challenge. Reflection also began with the our #MathIs exit ticket. 

           Rational Numbers is a difficult unit for any 7th grader. My first year teaching, with a naive mind I believed my written notes were the most wonderful thing and there was not a chance my students would not succeed... EPIC FAILURE! I laugh at myself now for thinking that was the smart way to go. Now that I know better I knew teacher centered learning was not the way to go. 

        BEGINNING: Students had a pre-quiz so that I could realize what their absolute weakness was. I separated my students by those weaknesses and had them watch a tutorial video that I created on showme.com. Students then created a mini-poster that allowed them to practice solving rational number operations and have a written step by step explanation. 

            REFLECTION FOR THE FUTURE: I will create a menu of options as to how they would like to create their mini-poster (prezi, powerpoint, google doc, powtoon, create a video tutorial themselves, create a mini-poster as I had assigned this school year) to allow their own creativity to shine!!!

         MIDWAY: Now that student had practice with the computational part of rational numbers it was time to move the problem solving part of rational numbers... the scary part! I realized many of my students had a hard time picturing the real world problem which is why they couldn't understand which answer was unreasonable. I assigned students a word problem in which they created an animation for on powtoon.com. How some of my students visualized their word problem:

• https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/b2YaKa5IgTN/?mode=movie#/
• https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/eB7FSm5NnXZ/?mode=movie#/

          REFLECTION FOR THE FUTURE: Allowing my students more time to create their animation as well as giving them an option on how to create it (creating a video representing the word problem, creating their own visual if they prefer drawing).

             ENDING: I included the student made animations as visuals in the students independent practice which I noticed help many of my students when they were trying to problem solve. 

Did I meet my goal on having a student centered classroom for our first unit... I believe so. I hope these student centered ideas can be changed a bit to be used in your own classroom. If you have any other ideas that I could incorporate I would love to hear them!!!