Day 61 Find the Whole Given the Part

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.RP.3c Find a percent of a quantity as a rate per 100 (e.g., 30% of a quantity means 30/100 times the quantity); solve problems involving finding the whole, given a part and the percent.

The Learning Objective: Find the part given the whole.

Quote of the Day: “So often we fail to acknowledge what we have because we’re so concerned about what we want. We fail to give real thanks for the many blessings for which we did nothing: our life itself, the flowers, the trees, our family and friends. This moment. All of our blessings we take for granted so much of the time.” - John Wooden

Question from Yesterday (as always from a student):

Assessment:

Agenda:

1. 99 Restaurant Jumpstart
2. Review the percent of a number material which the substitute covered
3. My favorite no. Mrs. H got 21 questions correct. She scored a 70%. How many questions were on the test?
4. Visual Proportions
5. Coupons

Glass-Half Full: I like making the real world connection right away to the lesson with the 99 Restaurant problem in which the tip is given, but the bill is not.

Regrets: The homework becomes too simplistic after the first four examples or so. There needs to be a variance in the difficulty. Students should need to divide by decimals or use scaling like the My Favorite No question. We could also bring in a percent of a number type of question to this homework which was straight from the book (Lesson 8).

Day 59: Ordering Percents, Fractions, Decimals

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.NS.6 Understand a rational number as a point on the number line. Extend number line diagrams and coordinate axes familiar from previous grades to represent points on the line and in the plane with negative number coordinates.

The Learning Objective: Order fractions, decimals, and percentages

Question from Yesterday (as always from a student): What is 3/8 as a percent?

Assessment: Students did their choice of problem on the back of the notes and showed one of the teachers before getting a book and starting the homework.

Agenda:

1. Self Assessment of quiz
2. Review the quiz 
3. Pepper
4. Notes on ordering
5. Practice of ordering

Glass-Half Full: What went well today was the amount of time we had for pepper. It's amazing how these students vocabulary is relative to groups I have had in the past. The integration of pepper and spiraling back between different terms has been helpful in mastering these concepts and not storing them in the gutters of the brain.

Regrets: As one of the co-teachers told me, it's difficult to get a sense of the real-world connection for how this is all relevant. Not sure where to go with this as I believe it is just simply a skill that students need to have in their toolbox. Perhaps I can use the analogy of being able to speak different languages because these three math languages have very strict translations.

Day 58: Decimal, Fraction, Percent Quiz

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.NS.6 Understand a rational number as a point on the number line. Extend number line diagrams and coordinate axes familiar from previous grades to represent points on the line and in the plane with negative number coordinates.

The Learning Objective: Convert between fractions, decimals and percents.

Quote of the Day: “People had been trying to achieve the four minute mile since the ancient Greeks. They decided it was impossible. Bone structure was all wrong. Inadequate lung power. There was a million reasons. Then one man, one single human being, proved that the doctors, the trainers, the athletes, and the millions who had tried and failed were all wrong. And miracle after miracles, the year after Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, thirty-seven other runners broke the four-minute mile, and the year after that three hundred runners broke the four minute mile. A few years ago, I stood at the finish line of the Fifth Avenue Mile and watched thirteen out of thirteen runners break the four-minute mile in a single race. In other word, the runner who had finished dead last would have been regarded as having accomplished the impossible a few decades ago. What happened? There were no great breakthroughs in training. Human bone structure didn’t suddenly improve. But human attitudes did.” – Harvey MacKay

Question from Yesterday (as always from a student): "What will 1.29 be as a percent?"

Assessment: The quiz

Agenda:

1. Four squares comparison
2. Review the homework and pepper
3. A couple review problems until the bell rang
4. Take the quiz
5. Work on the weekly quiz
6. What two factors will equal 1,000,000 without using any zeroes 

Glass-Half Full: The four squares jumpstart promotes vocabulary, teamwork, and engagement. I want more of this and it needs to happen weekly.

Regrets: Could there have been a study guide? It certainly would have helped with 3/8 into a percentage.

Day 57: Decimal & Percent Conversion

6th Grade Math Standards: Understand a rational number as a point on the number line. Extend number line diagrams and coordinate axes familiar from previous grades to represent points on the line and in the plane with negative number coordinates.

The Learning Objective: Convert decimals to percentages

Quote of the Day: The odds of a perfect game being thrown in baseball (one in twenty thousand) are far smaller than the chance you will be struck by lightning in your lifetime. But a perfect game is precisely what Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga had happening one early June evening in 2010. He’d recorded twenty-six consecutive outs and had gotten the twenty-seventh batter to tap a weak ground ball to the first baseman, tagged the bag ahead of the runner and got ready to celebrate. There was only one problem: the umpire, Jim Joyce, swung his arms wide and shouted “Safe!”

When he got back into the umpire’s locker room, Joyce immediately cued the game video and watched the play – only once. He saw how badly he’d blown the call. But instead of letting the dust settle in silence like so many of his colleagues, Joyce chose a different path. He walked straight to the Detroit Tigers locker room and requested an audience with Galarraga.

Face red as a tomato, and tears in his eyes, he hugged Galarraga and managed to get out two words before dissolving into tears: ‘Lo Siento.’

About 16 hours later, the Tigers and Indians played again, but the meeting that mattered came before the game when Galarraga was tabbed for the trip to home plate to turn in the lineup card. Joyce was waiting for him. The two exchanged handshakes and hugs in one of the most inspiring, emotional, and moving displays of sportsmanship any sport has ever seen.” – Dale Carnegie  
Question from Yesterday (as always from a student): "Is that a fraction or a ratio?"

Assessment: Weekly quiz was given back to students corrected with highlights to fix problems that were wrong; my favorite no; homework examples; pepper responses

Agenda:

1. Jumpstart with number lines 
2. Collect WQ 
3. Visual Patterns #14
4. Pepper as students put problems on the board
5. Review homework
6. My favorite no convert 2/9 to a percent and 0.7 to a percent
7. Notes on decimals to percentages 
8. Work on the homework

Glass-Half Full: This is the most I have ever seen students correctly determine what 0.7 is as a percentage. It was also nice to see how students came up with 22% on my favorite no. Some divided and some just found equivalent fractions (multiplying 9 by 11). The repeating decimal part of is what was new for the students.

Regrets: Not going over the 13th problem on the homework was a mistake because many students got it right. It just was one of those things I forgot within the flow of the class.

Day 56: Fraction & Percentage Conversion

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.NS.6 Understand a rational number as a point on the number line. Extend number line diagrams and coordinate axes familiar from previous grades to represent points on the line and in the plane with negative number coordinates.

The Learning Objective: Convert between fractions and percents.

Quote of the Day: “The formula is 6-2-7; breathe in for 6 seconds, hold for 2 and breathe out for 7 seconds. Many times, the heart rate in training is far lower than it is in competition. This change in arousal between competition and training usually has adverse effects on performance. With this in mind, it is a priority for athletes to learn to control heart rate so that training and competition arousal states are similar.”

Question from Yesterday (as always from a student): If we divide 100 by the denominator and multiply the numerator will that get a decimal equivalent?

Assessment: Circumventing the room during homework, exit ticket

Agenda:

1. These 4 problems done in groups by class section. Whoever can point out the most "one of these things is not like the other" wins. 
2. Review the homework by having students go to the board and pepper
3. Fraction to decimal ticket to leave
4. Fraction to percent notes
5. Fraction to percent practice
6. Work on the weekly quiz

Glass-Half Full: The warm up problem was engaging, vocabulary enriching, and involved teamwork.

Regrets: There was a great deal of time to work on homework. I wish students had more focus so that they had more time to get the weekly quiz done.

Day 55: Fraction and Decimal Conversion

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.NS.6 Understand a rational number as a point on the number line. Extend number line diagrams and coordinate axes familiar from previous grades to represent points on the line and in the plane with negative number coordinates.
a. Recognize opposite signs of numbers as indicating locations on opposite sides of 0 on the number line; recognize that the opposite of the opposite of a number is the number itself, e.g., –(–3) = 3, and that 0 is its own opposite.
b. Understand signs of numbers in ordered pairs as indicating locations in quadrants of the coordinate plane; recognize that when two ordered pairs differ only by signs, the locations of the points are related by reflections across one or both axes.
c. Find and position integers and other rational numbers on a horizontal or vertical number line diagram; find and position pairs of integers and other rational numbers on a coordinate plane.

The Learning Objective: Convert between fractions and decimals.

Quote of the Day: "Dr. Frankl had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp with his wife, parents, and brother. His father died of pneumonia in Treblinka, his mother and brother were gassed at Auschwitz, and his wife, Tilly, died of malnutrition at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, two days after it was liberated by British troops. He alone survived. Frankl wrote afterward that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the greatest of all human freedoms, the ability to choose how to respond to any given circumstance. Frankl said that we retain the freedom to choose our attitudes and actions in response to whatever life deals us.” – Joe Ehrmann

Question from Yesterday (as always from a student): What was the life expectancy for women at the time of Louisa May Alcott's death? What are factors that can alter life expectancy over time?

Assessment: During the my favorite no, I had 1 out of 27 students successfully convert 5/6 into a decimal. It was a little surprising because it is a skill we have been chipping away at slowly all year by putting their grades in fractions at the top of their pages in math class and social studies class. Most students wrote 1.2 (which is at least thinking about division), 0.56, 0.5, and 5.6.

Agenda:

1. Estimation 180 - Day 63 through 65
2. Pass out the weekly quiz
3. My Favorite No: Conver 5/6 to a decimal
4. Place value review using Turning Point Clickers
5. Fraction & Decimal packet 
6. Start weekly quiz (if time allows)

Glass-Half Full: Just seeing that only one out of twenty-seven in my first class could do the skill that we were working toward was valuable information. Now we can really focus on central issues such as what's too high and low for any proper fraction (it has to be between 0 and 1) and what the fraction bar means (division).

Regrets: More space to do the work on the packet.

Day 53: Zombie Bridge

6th Grade Math Standards: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. Mathematically proficient students start by explaining to themselves the meaning of a problem and looking for entry points to its solution. They analyze givens, constraints, relationships, and goals. They make conjectures about the form and meaning of the solution and plan a solution pathway rather than simply jumping into a solution attempt. They consider analogous problems, and try special cases and simpler forms of the original problem in order to gain insight into its solution. They monitor and evaluate their progress and change course if necessary. Older students might, depending on the context of the problem, transform algebraic expressions or change the viewing window on their graphing calculator to get the information they need. Mathematically proficient students can explain correspondences between equations, verbal descriptions, tables, and graphs or draw diagrams of important features and relationships, graph data, and search for regularity or trends. Younger students might rely on using concrete objects or pictures to help conceptualize and solve a problem. Mathematically proficient students check their answers to problems using a different method, and they continually ask themselves, “Does this make sense?” They can understand the approaches of others to solving complex problems and identify correspondences between different approaches.

The Learning Objective: Persevere in problem solving

Quote of the Day: “When the USA Basketball team failed to win the gold medal at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece, many asked, “How could this happen? How could the USA team - every player an NBA All-Star - lose to Argentina, Lithuania, and Puerto Rico? We sent great players. They sent great teams.” - John Wooden

Question from Yesterday (as always from a student): "How many numbers are between 11/5 and 12/5?"

Assessment: Circumventing the room during Zombie Bridge; self-assessment papers from the fractions test

Agenda:

1. Self Assessment
2. Review the test
3. Yummy Math & Mashed Potatoes 
4. Zombie Bridge

Glass-Half Full: Nobody out of 116 students solved Zombie Bridge. Yet all were engaged and involved in the process. The students were able to successfully get across the bridge in 19 minutes, but could not get under 18 minutes.

Regrets: The other team did the fractions test today and probably experienced better results. That being said, doing the test today meant not doing the Zombie Bridge problem. I want to have students not only get good grades, but enjoy math class. That's what Zombie Bridge helps us do, so it's hard to call this a regret, but I do wish that we did not have to give a test on a Monday. Then again, people are expected to perform in the real world on the first day of the week.

Link of the Day: The best 3 countries for working women: Finland, Sweeden, and Norway.