Today, was our final day with Inspriational Math from youcubed.org. It has been a blast!
Today's lesson was "Growing Patterns". As usual, I wanted to warm up their brain so we did a few brainteasers. First, I asked to them to discover how we could get to the answer 17. To make it a little more challenging, I asked them to write a three-step equation. Next, we did our estimation180 for the day. The kids really seem to enjoy these activities!
Next we watched the mindset video that refocused on the idea that mistakes grow your brain. I liked their examples, they used Thomas Edison and Michael Jordan. Both men were examples that in order to succeed you have to fail (sometimes miserably). After the video, I asked the table groups to complete the following analogy:
Mistakes are to learning as __________
is to _____________.
Ask your child how their table group filled in the blanks! I was very pleased with their deep thinking!
The actual lesson focused on the following visual from the youcubed.org lesson for Day 5:
We looked at the visual for a full minute, then I asked the table groups to share what they "saw". Finally, we shared out our discoveries. To help people see the growth pattern, we actually used colored tiles to create each Case. I explained that we would not always be able to use manipulatives to solve a problem, so we needed to see if we could determine the equation that would help us solve for say, the 100th, case.
To begin, we created a t-chart. We had the case number on the left, and the number of squares on the right. We then created the 4th and 5th case in order to add them to our table. Now that we had some information to use, we began to look for patterns.
It was difficult thinking, but as my kids now know, if it is difficult, your brain is growing! We were able to find the equation together. To show their understanding, I asked each student to use the information we had discovered to tell me how many tiles we would have to use to show the 499th Case. They were all successful!
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