Last week I wrote about a lesson I had developed from a video I saw about a volunteer in Lesbos using the materials of life jackets for bags. This is a reflection on how the lesson went with my class.
First of all, it was motivating, inspiring, open, and students had to persevere.
The day after I wrote the lesson we were not going to have math since we were going on a field trip, but I had 15 minutes before we left on the trip and I was able to engage students in some wondering. We went through the first slides and noticed and wondered, not thinking about math at all. Though, my students are now mathematizing the world, so a few mathematical wonderings came through.
Then that evening they read this article and were able to answer some of their wonderings.
The math extravaganza began. We took on a math lens and thought like mathematicians. Noticing, wondering and determining what information we needed.
I am always so amazed with the mathematical questions students are developing now. Determining what they needed was a lot harder than in other lessons we have done. Why? It was a big scale problem with multiple questions to solve. But, through conversation they came up with some good ideas. I then gave the students the information they asked for and they were off!
It was fascinating to watch how students approached the problem. Some just started tracing complex shapes, others grabbed rulers and drew precise lines, others drew free hand lines, but then as they saw their classmates using rulers, changed their minds. 
They helped each other and after awhile all students were looking for shapes that they knew how to find the area of. I had a few students that really struggled with this and I wanted them to get to finding the area, so I provided them with my shapes. Then they were off. It was a great way for some students to get additional reasoning with finding the area of shapes and it was through this problem that some really saw the relationships of different shapes to one another.
“I know how to find the area of triangles, so I decided to turn all these into triangles. There are triangles in every shape. ”
And then they solved….
Thinking, connecting, and then we needed a discussion. Can we find the actual area if we use the ratio 1 mm: 2 4/5m?
We discussed how the ratio we were given was a linear ratio and we could use that for finding length, but to find area, we needed to create a new ratio of square millimeters to square meters. And then we had some solutions…
We shared different strategies: converting all the lengths in millimeters to meters and then finding the area compared to finding the area in square millimeters and then converting to different units. We then found the median and mean of our results.
Then came the question: How many lifejackets are there in 40,000 square meters?
It was great to be able to review the use of ratio tables and to see the different ways students approached the problem, connecting the three different strategies. We engaged in the “Compare and Connect” math discussion that is introduced in Intentional Talk by Elham Kazemi and Allison Hintz
And then there were the students who extended the problem…
I clearly am a terrible photographer… But did you know that 40,000 square meters is equivalent to 7 1/2 football fields, 91 1/2 NBA regulation basketball courts and about 1/2 of Buckingham palace?
And if you were to lay pencils down in 40,000 square meters, you can fit 3,007,518 pencils. hahaha
Finally came…
Hahaha, this is when I was reminded I work with 11 and 12 year olds. What would they do? “I would make a pile and build a huge slide on it.”
“I would jump in the lifejackets.”
“I would take them back to Turkey and resell them.”
“I would make a boat out of them and sell the boat.”
Clearly, we have fun seekers and entrepreneurs. Next time, I would change the question to… What would you MAKE with 450,000 life jackets?
I then shared with them the video about how they are making bags out of the lifejackets and left students with the question. What extraneous materials do we have lying around and what useful object could we make out of it?
It was a two day lesson, but a lot of learning: using a ruler, calculating area, solving proportions, developing a plan, comparing and connecting, and persevering.
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