I did a maths lesson yesterday about patterns and one of the activities was from the awesome Mrs Lirettes Learning Dectives. This activity had students trying to find the rule to a pattern in order to fill in the missing spots. I had printed it, laminated and cut and thought, no worries!
How wrong I was! Its that moment that you dred, when the best laid (lesson) plans just fall apart. The kids were struggling, I was tearing my hair out and thinking to myself - why don't these kids know how to do this?In the end I just got the pattern blocks out and asked them to create patterns with the blocks, rather than cause more undue stress. Right or wrong decision, I dont know, but I noticed how much the kids enjoyed putting the blocks together to make patterns. A lesson idea started blooming....
Today we went back to talk about how to find the rule in a pattern and they seemed to be getting it, which was great. But I wasn't about to let the pattern block lesson go...The blog is not called Teachable Moments for nothing!
I gave out a handful of shapes to each table and a large piece of paper with writing lines. I demonstrated on the SMART board how I could create a a picture with the shapes (I made a flower using the hexagon for the centre, trapeziums for the petals and little triangles for the stalk). The kids were hooked! They started talking about what the were going to create - from robots, to palm trees, to dogs! The catch was that they had to explain their drawing and talk about what shapes they used. BOOYAH! 2D shape lesson combined with writing. The results were great!
There was a lot of flower pictures - could it have had anything to do with my example I wonder?
Love this one - "This is the best robot I drew today"
Nice sentiment here "I made my family"
These lessons have to be my favourite - take the moment and run with it :)
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