Standards:
Act 1
What do you notice?
What do you wonder?
3-Act Task: Finding a Balance
4
Tag Archives: 3-act tasks
Word Problems and the Problems with Words
Yesterday, I posted a new 3-act task on the blog. In the tradition of digital mentors like Graham Fletcher, Andrew Stadel, and Dane Ehlert, I will rarely post an activity on the blog that I don’t intend to use in my own class with students. Today, we did Make It Rain.
Here is what my students noticed during Act 1…
- There’s a lot of money
- There are 20’s, 10’s, 5’s, and 1’s
- There are more 20’s than 10’s
And here’s what they wondered…
- How much money is there?
- Why did it go from greatest to least?
- Why was it being spread out?
- What kind of bills were in the pile?
- How many of each bill is there?
My students are used to analyzing their questions collaboratively. Some of the students noted that we couldn’t answer the “why?” questions without asking the person in the video, who we did not have access to (even though it was me!)
So, then our wonderings looked more like this…
3-Act Task: Make It Rain!
Standards:
Act 1
What do you notice?
What do you wonder?
3-act Task: Trail Mix
Student engagement is a funny thing.
On twitter I’ve been pretty critical about using extrinsic rewards to increase student engagement.
Me to extrinsic rewards for engagement. I just can’t get behind it, but open to being wrong https://t.co/jFviTCJZdN pic.twitter.com/nJeRISGREN
— Andrew Gael (@bkdidact) March 1, 2016
Today was our 100th day of school (as calculated by our students!) To celebrate we made 100 piece trail mix. Our trail mix included: cheerios, chex, raisins, and M&Ms. Candy! Talk about extrinsic student engagement! Before we dove in to the rewards food, I gave my class the following problem:
We have 4 ingredients to make trail mix. How many different combinations of ingredients can we have if our trail mix only has 100 total pieces?
The students persisted through their work on this word problem, until they arrived at various solutions based on their calculations and personal taste. For instance, one student is allergic to nuts and could only eat the cheerios and raisins, so that impacted his work on the problem. The students worked diligently and happily ate the trail mix once they had arrived at a reasonable solution.
However, after class I channeled Graham Fletcher and Dan Meyer to try to make this mathematical experience a more rich one for the students. So, here is a preview of the 3-act task we will be doing tomorrow in class…
#MTBoS Mod: 3-Act Edition
One of the missions of this blog is to take the work of the amazing online community of math teachers known as the MathTwitterBlogoSphere (MTBoS) and to show what modifications are made for students with disabilities. I call it the #MTBoS Mod(ification). You can read the first two editions here and here. This edition is about the lesson structure created by Dan Meyer known as a 3-Act Task.
#MTBoS MOD: 3-Act Edition
The 3-Act math task I chose was created by Graham Fletcher called It All Adds Up. I chose this because in our spring trimester we focus solely on financial literacy. As a teacher of students with disabilities we spend a great deal of time on the adaptive mathematics that is often over-looked or just simply considered a “real world context” in the classes of typically developing students. In the world of special education these tasks are known as Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs), which are complex skills needed to live independently. IADLs are not to be confused with the Activities of Daily Living, which are basic self-care tasks. At my school we call these skills the Mathematics for the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living.
As a pre-assessment for our “money unit” (as the students call it) I used “It All Adds Up.” The goal was to see how comfortable the students were with identifying coins and counting different combinations of coin denominations. I launched the task with three of my student groups. The task is great for students at different computation levels. At the simplest level the students can solve it by adding coins together to equal $1.00. At a more complex level students can look for patterns that can help them solve the problem more efficiently as well as reflect on the possibility of multiple solutions to the problem. I gave this task to groups of students with a variety of different needs and modes of processing. I’ve broken the three groups into the three stages of the Concrete-Representational-Abstract method of instruction.
andrewgael.com 