Author: Julie Petersen

Geometry students built their vocabulary words today.  Polyhedrons are constructed with faces, edges and vertices.  Our clay and toothpicks were a little messy, but a lot creative.  In the pictures you can see tetrahedrons, pentahedrons, hexahedrons, heptahedrons and octahedrons.  Most examples include two models of each polyhedron.

Inductive reasoning allows us to look at the data, find a pattern and make a generalization about that pattern.  Students put their heads together to discover Euler’s Formula:  V + F – E = 2.  That is read “vertices plus faces minus edges equals 2”.

Once again, learning can get loud!

By the way, here is our riddle for the day:  What did the bird do when he got scared?  Poly he’d run!  (Get it?  Polyhedron!)

 

 

Geometry students calculated the height of the giant light pole on the east side of the football field.  Cooperative groups of four students each fulfilled their responsibility to measure three segments and solve for a missing value.  Using similar triangles theorems, Angle-Angle-Similarity allowed students to set up a proportion.  The result was 83 feet.

Ready, set, ROLL!

Students in Mrs. Petersen’s General Math 8 class spent Friday morning rolling dice with enthusiasm!  Each student held a red and green dice; red = positive numbers and green = negative numbers.  With two dice bouncing on the table, students race to find a sum first.  Gathering up to fifteen points, students worked their way through a double elimination tournament.

Do they know they solved up to 105 math problems today?  Positive energy was evident in the numerous smiles, unseen during a traditional math worksheet.  Whether you add and subtract integers with a number line, colored coins, algorithms (step by step rules) or a pair of dice, students are mastering Nebraska Math Standard 8.1.2a.

Learning can be loud.  The sound of dice landing in the table and students shouting answers filled the classroom.

Click for a video link.

 

When will I ever have to solve a proportion in life?  That’s a great question!  Students in Mrs. Julie Petersen’s 8th grade math class selected a fun hat – Thinking Cap – to wear during class.  While wearing that hat they wrote short stories about how that particular hat-wearing-person would use a proportion in life.

Joel stated, “Bonnie the bunny is looking for three carrots to eat for the next five days.  If she looks for 15 days, how many carrots does she need?”

Bri may find a future in the royal family.  “The princess had 100 pieces of jewelry and the prince had 50.  They both went to the store and the princess came back with 500 pieces of jewelry.  How many did her prince bring home?”

Other students were talking about bananas, fish, books, horses and even tigers jumping through flaming hoops!  They didn’t even pause to ask why they were writing complete sentences in math!

The smiles continued as Trent asked, “If I told 12 jokes and my sister told 7 jokes, then next day I told 24 jokes, how many did my sister tell?”

Life application of math lessons add value to long term memories.

Hat donations are accepted.  🙂

Geometry proofs can be extra challenging for students.  Even parents remember solving proofs when they were in school.  Paragraph proofs and two column proofs can be simplified by making them visual with a flowchart proof.

Students in Mrs. Petersen’s geometry class assembled their knowledge of congruent angles (vertical, alternate interior, angle bisector) and congruent segments (midpoint, isosceles triangle, reflexive, parallelogram) to prove triangles are congruent.  All the needed information was given for students to cut and paste in the right order.  Then arrows can show the flow through the process.

Although still challenging, students worked hard and found success.  At the end of class Mrs. Petersen said, “I can hear your brains getting exhausted.”  It is rewarding to see the skills of the first month of school assembled in to one problem.  One of the students in class replied, “I think I actually understand flowcharts!  It was easier than I expected.”

With all of the cutting and pasting, students saved paper by recycling (better known as reusing) old softball game programs.

See pictures below for examples of their work.