Day 167 to 169 Calories and Exercise

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.RP.2 Understand the concept of a unit rate a/b associated with a ratio a:b with b ≠ 0, and use rate language in the context of a ratio relationship. For example, “This recipe has a ratio of 3 cups of flour to 4 cups of sugar, so there is ¾ cup of flour for each cup of sugar.” “We paid $75 for 15 hamburgers, which is a rate of $5 per hamburger.”

6.NS.2 Fluently divide multi-digit numbers using the standard algorithm.

6.NS.3 Fluently add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit decimals using the standard algorithm for each operation

Question from Yesterday (as always from a student): How do I know if the answer makes sense?

The Learning Objective: Determine a relationship between calories, weight, and exercise

Assessment: The students were given the chart from Mathalicious. I also had students fill in the chart about the amount of time that would be required to burn off a Big Mac, a french fry, etc.

Agenda:

1. Show the Dwight Howard and LeBron James McDonalds commercial
2. Discuss what factors would determine how long it would take for LeBron to burn off a Big Mac. It was very engaging when the class debated about whether the person's weight would determine how many calories were burnt off or if it was just the intensity at which the exercise was done. 
3. Model for students how to find the number of calories a person burns off with various forms of exercise (basketball, soccer, walking). I showed them with proportions and dimensional analysis. 
4. Students worked with a partner on the packet I modified from Mathalicious. 
5. For the duration of the class I asked students why their answers made sense

Glass Half-Full: At the core of what we should be teaching in math is what I did in step five of the agenda covered above. Students were able to successfully explain to me why Justin Timberlake would born more calories than Selena Gomez (he had more weight and therefore more cells which led to more calories being burnt). What I was noticing though on many papers was that students were unable to look back at their work when they were writing down the calories burnt in one minute. They would get lower numbers for Justin than Selena. I had to point this out to them.

I started on this hunt by accident when I noticed two students had made these calculation errors. It then became the most important aspect of this project. They all will use a calculator in the real world, but the question becomes will they look back on the calculation to see if it makes sense or simply trust the calculator. Even if students had the answers correct, I pointed to one random number in their chart and asked why that answer made sense. Too many of them went back to the multiplication alone for their reasoning. I'm not all out against this idea, but they should have more diverse means of checking their work and faster approaches.

Regrets: Recording the work was painful to grade and painful for the students to write. The modified template needs to include a place to put the work for Justin Timberlake's exercises, Abby Wambach's exercises, etc. because the students did not have the executive functioning skills to carry this out.

Link of the Day: I thought these statistics were alarming regarding homicides in the United States via gun violence. Overall a very informative article on just how prevalent guns are in the country relative to other countries.