Month: November 2017

The Ratio of Skittles

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I am so blessed that we teach ratios in the Fall!  Halloween and the day after Halloween are a cheap and easy way to obtain candy to turn into ratios and proportions.   Towards the end of our unit, students were given an assignment in Google classroom.  The only trees harmed in the activity were the ones that were under the skittles to use as “plates”.

Skittles Lesson:  Students will write the colors as a proportional relationship and solve proportions using multiple strategies including cross products.

Skittles Lab Activity – Original

Copy of Skittles Lab – Adapted

As our “Fun Friday,” students logged into Google Classroom and I previewed the activity.  It includes creating a pie chart.  You need to go to “insert”, “Chart” and then “pie.”  The students would not see the “Create in Sheets” in the lower lefthand corner, so I showed them a few times on the Smartboard.

  1.  Students were asked and able to take the ratio of different color skittles and put it in a chart.  Instead of a coordinate graph, this lesson uses a pie graph which we see a lot of proportions use as well.
  2. Students then got to eat their math which is always fun!
  3. Students turned in the lab activity in Google Classroom.  Due to time constraints, I did not do the Google Drawing section.

Smoothies and Ratios

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This Fun Friday was a LOT of fun!!  I asked the parents 2 weeks ago via Sign Up Genius to buy one food item.  The parents were happy to help contribute and I ended up with plenty of supplies.  On the day of smoothie making, I provided my huge Ikea smoothie straws, blender, vanilla and oats.

My morning class made these in the teacher’s lounge since lunchtime was far away.  It was handy to have the space and sink. My afternoon class stayed in the classroom and it still worked out well.  I made sure to have lots of napkins, wet washcloths and a disposable tablecloth (or the trash can liner works well in a pinch too!).

  1.  After our morning warm-up and Brain Pop video, the students had to get into groups of 2 or 3 and choose a smoothie recipe from the handout.

**One change I would make to the handout is that you need ice.  Smoothies taste better cold and I added a cup of ice cubes to each recipe to make it colder. **

2.  Once they picked a recipe, I gave the students *part* of the new recipe.  So for recipe #4, I gave one group 2 and a half bananas.  So they had to figure out the rest of the recipe based on that proportion.  Of course you can do this two ways:  cross multiply and divide or find the ratio.  Some students figured this out intuitively and others took a little longer.

One group received 5 strawberries instead of 4.  They figured out they needed to multiply all of their ingredients by one constant (which is faster than cross multiply and divide) – I never told them this!  It was amazing!

Star Wars Crawl for the Classroom

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi is coming in December!!!  Why not give the students instructions on a Star Wars crawl instead of a Powerpoint presentation?  Or embed this into Google Classroom!

Last week, I set up a Breakout game for the students where they had to use mathematics to solve puzzles in order to open the box.  Now the game included a Powerpoint with a cheesy little story about the Dentist.  I didn’t want to do the dentist story.  It seemed far fetched.  Okay okay, Star Wars is far fetched, too…..

I have a Princess Leia wig… and costume…

and why can’t I have a video give the students instructions?

(photo credit: Star Words on Google Play)

So here is one example!  You could use this to give an exit ticket at the end of class.  You could use the video to give instructions for a lesson.  You can add whatever text you want!  Need a fun way to give announcements?  Write them in Star Words!

Here is how I created the video:

  1.  Downloaded the “Star Words” app onto my phone.
  2. Used the editor to write the text.
  3. Played the video until it was just the way I wanted it.
  4. The app has a record option.  Warning!!  Everything gets recorded!!!  You sneeze, you hiccup, birds tweet, everything.  So make sure it is quiet.
  5. Once recorded, it was stored in my Internal Storage under “Videos”.  From there I shared it with my Google Drive.
  6. Once on my drive, I downloaded the mp4 file to my laptop at school.  The drive doesn’t like mp4 files and was not playing them right until I downloaded the original file.
  7. I embedded this file into my Powerpoint presentation and had to make two movies because I teach at two different schools.  You wouldn’t have to do this extra step.  It just makes the flow easier.  I don’t like stopping class to pull something up when I can embed it once and use the presentation year after year.