PBL: Kid in a Candy Store

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I must say, we had a full math day!  To begin, we started with our creative thinking using a Would You Rather

Then we needed to do a little house cleaning.  I needed to reward them with their STAAR bucks from the past week based on their progress in Khan.  Then, I wanted to make sure they knew where they were in our Khan Club, so we added our name to the wall, or got a t-shirt, or achieved our banquet invitation,etc.

KHAN CLUB

30 Mastered Skills - Get in the club

45 Mastered Skills - Awarded a Khan Club t-shirt

60 Mastered Skills - Invitation to Khan Banquet

75 Mastered Skills - Sit at the head table at the banquet

90 Mastered Skills - Medals Awarded

Highest number of Khan Mastered Skills -

 "TOP Khan Award"

Our next housekeeping, was to plot our Countdown to STAAR on our graphs.  We have been doing this since the first Countdown to STAAR in order to visually see how we are doing.

 I asked my students to look at their graph and choose the two TEKS they were not happy with and they chose them on a Google Form.  Here is a sampling of the form:

This form was created using the new Google Form format.  What I didn't know/expect, was the way the gathered information can be shown:

This allowed me to see that the TEK my students were having the most difficulty with was still PEMDAS.  It is not that they don't know how to work a problem using PEMDAS, it is that they don't automatically think to use PEMDAS in an expression or equation that shows multiple steps.

Our next step was to complete today's www.estimation180.com activity and completing a problem of the day using a problem from the Kamico STAAR Connection Diagnostic Series.  We will do this daily as we prepare for the STAAR Math test on March 29.

It was finally time to begin our new PBL activity:  Kid in a Candy Store.  Today we began part 1, which consisted of watching a quick video, naming our store, and working with a floor plan.  We created our "floor" using coordinate pairs, locating the point of origin, labeling our x-and y-axes, and numbering our lines.  Then we determined our measurements, found the perimeter of the store and the area of the store.  

I will not be sharing examples or much detail during this process as I purchased this from www.teacherspayteachers.com and want to be fair to the educator who created this activity.

As usual, we finished with a Countdown to STAAR.