Week 1

I am trying to design lessons or projects in order to promote my students thinking and creativity.

For the week of 9/2 - 9/5:

I actually discussed the project with my Advanced Algebra and Trig classes the week before. I opened up a discussion on what type of project that they may be interested in doing either as a class or as individuals. I really just wanted to see what type of information that I got back from them. I had already brainstormed a lot and knew what type of things that I wanted for them to do. I let them think about it over the weekend and them on Tues. 9/2 I brought it up for discussion again. Many students really had no idea of anything that they wanted to do. I posed some suggestions such as a chronological newspaper over the centuries where differents students focused on a certain century to research the mathematics that occured. I also discussed them creating ways to teach various topics that they know to those that were absent. We have left it this week as still brainstorming. We will finalize the projects next week.

In the concepts of Algebra class, we were beginning a unit on fractions. I asked the students to choose a topic in fractions that they wanted to work with and develop a lesson and activity to teach the topic. They were given 3 days in class to develop the activity and lesson and a portion of the classes each day I worked with the individual groups in order to clarify any questions they have and to make sure their activity was appropriate for the class. Some of the groups are obviously made of more creative minds than others, but I hope as I continue this type of activity the other students will open up to be more creative.

This is definately something that will continue to be a struggle for me. It is a challenge to come up with ways for students to show their creativity in mathematics when you are not used to thinking so hard about the lessons.