Embracing the Fidget Spinner Fight

This is a combined blog effort with English Middle School Mania! 

The 2016-2017 school year is officially over for us! We are so beyond ready for summer. For weeks we’ve been fighting the “fidget spinner battle” and that combined with trying to keep students engaged during the last week of school got our wheels turning. As teachers we tend to understand the last week of school is often something the students aren't going to put much time or effort into, they're "checked-out" and so are we. We were both undecided going into the last full week of school (That's the beauty of teaching for a combined total of 21 years, we could pull something together over the weekend!), then I said, "Wanna do a project about Spinners?" Of course Andi’s answer was “yes.”

Cross Curricular Planning: Trip of a Lifetime Project

I would like to start by telling you all how much I love projects that make connections with real world concepts. I had so much fun planning this project as well as working on this with my students.

This project was created as a cross curricular End-of-Unit project with my ELA teaching partner, English Middle School Mania. Students completed this project after reading Around the World in 80 Days and after completing a unit about rates, ratios, proportions, and converting decimals, fractions, and percents.

This project requires students to make decisions that required the use of math skills. The students created a budget, found the percent of a number, used proportions, and found unit rates and ratios.

This project includes the following:

• Planning Packet
• Slides Presentation for Students to complete
• Tic Tac Toe Board for options for final products
• A rubric for grading of the final project
• Aligned to the Common Core Math Standards with options to connect to Common Core ELA Standard

Students presented their final products gallery style and allowed the presentees to complete a short survey about their presentation. Students received useful feedback they were able to reflect on for future projects. Students were also given the opportunity to reflect on what they did well and what they could have done better.

My ELA teaching partner and I would like to do a cross curricular project each quarter for the remainder of the school year. I'm excited about what we'll come up with and the things that our students will create.

Students' Presenting and Parts of Presentations

Student mapped her trip with a map in her Slides Presentation.

Explanation of choice of Rental Car.

Student reflecting on what was hard.

Student's final budget and explanation.

Student's choice of final presentation using the Tic Tac Toe Board.

What I learned

• We have ability based classes and we accounted for our Advanced students without considering our Supported students. I learned that we must have accommodations for them before even beginning the project. I assumed that the students would be able to handle the workload with me working with them as a class step by step. That did not work and I ended up throwing out many parts for my Supported students.
• I should have created a checkpoint calendar. I find that when I have created checkpoint calendars in the past students are more organized when working. Students also know what I expect and when I expect it. I also have an idea of the quality of work and can stop students who are off track to help to get back on track. This time around I assigned task for the day and as homework but I still had students working on what they wanted to and when I checked in for participation points some students did not receive those easy points.

I hope you check out my project on TpT. Thank you for stoping by!

Until next time,