Weekly Report & Reflection Weekly Blog #11

Formative Assessment

This week we covered Geometric art/shapes, as well as a discussion about assessment. I thought that the Geometric Art by Simon Beck were incredible! I have never seen anything like that, as the closest thing to “snow art” I have seen are snow angels and snowmen. These images led into the discussion about geometric art that our mathematics professor, Patricia M, drew in the snow after seeing these images. After discussing drawing the image of a heart in the snow, we did an activity as a class with seeing how many times we could spell heart, using this pyramid image of the lettering of the word “heart”. The following image demonstrates what the activity looks like, and the answer that we came up with as a class.

 

After this activity, we jumped into another activity after reflecting on prizes that we used to collect at the bottom of our cereal boxes. Typically, the cereal companies will have a series of prizes for you to collect. As kids, growing up you always wanted to have at least one of every prize so that you had the entire collection. However, this was hard to come by, as you would receive multiples often. As a class, we tried to figure out how many boxes you would need to purchase, in order to collect all the prizes in the word problem. In our groups, we conducted trial runs with 1 die to see how many cereal boxes we may need to purchase in order to receive one of every prize. My group was able to conduct 5 trials in the allotted time, and the results can be seen below.

My way of thinking about this problem was that if there are 6 prizes, I thought about it in terms of you have a 1 in 6 chance of getting each prize. Therefore, my original thought was that you might get all 6 prizes if you purchased 36 boxes of cereal. However, there is no guaranteed way of knowing the definite answer to a question like this, as Padraic mentioned – different cities may have different prizes, but not all of them.

In addition, we discussed formative assessment. I found this lesson to be very useful as we are about to enter our two week internship, followed by our five week teaching block placement. I learned a lot about the three forms of assessment, as well as the achievement chart for math and descriptive feedback. I plan on keeping notes in the front of my binder from this lesson in regards to the three forms of assessment, as I feel that this lesson will be very helpful when it comes time for me to begin teaching lessons, and providing feedback on student work. I thought descriptive feedback would be any feedback that can lead to student improvement for learning, though I never thought about only providing positive feedback. I like this idea because if you provide students with positive feedback, it builds their confidence and makes them want to continue to do well.

Lastly, we were given time at the end of class to peer-edit the lesson plans that we created in pairs. I found this very useful prior to submitting a final copy. One other pair was able to look over the rough draft of the lesson plan and provide written feedback in the margins to show what could be changed and what needed to be added or expanded on. I found this very helpful as it helps us to improve the lesson plan in a way that a supply would be able to come in and know exactly what is being done that class.