This project evolved from the project a wrote about in the course I took for this program (link right). I was having a hard time figuring out what my students could make, that also incorporated geometry content. I googled some ideas, and I thought that having them make a sculpture would be fun, and not too challenging for my first Maker Education project. I was right and wrong about this.
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At first I was going to have this project span across the entire second semester, but then I moved schools. Since I was getting new students in the middle of the year, and I did not know their work ethic or mindset about math, I decided to just have this project cover Quadrilaterals, Area of 2D Figures, and Surface Area and Volume of 3D figures.
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I had my students work through this stampsheet to guide them through the launch at their own pace.
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OrigamiI wanted all of my students to be able to reflect on the process of Making something after that first day. In order for this to happen, we needed have a small Maker Activity. I decided to have my students make an origami bird. To the left are pictures of their birds. I think it was successful because most students found something challenging about making the birds, but everyone was able to have a piece of paper that resembled a bird in the end.
These are the supplies I used:
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I had a few students find art outside of the resources that I provided. One student choose the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama. She is black and found it inspiring that the Obama's choose black artists to make their portraits. She also appreciated that these do not look like previous presidential portraits.
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Another student choose art by different artists who were told to stop because what they were creating was impossible or scary, but they did not give up. Because they did not give up, we have Starry Nights by Vincent van Gogh and successful films by Tim Burton.
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First Journal Prompt:
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Weekly Journal Entry Prompt:
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Weekly Journal Entry
Current Grades:
Mathematical Concepts:
Living Sculpture:
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Mathematical Concepts:
Year Reflection, choose 3 questions to answer:
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After we learned about the properties of quadrilaterals, students knew about most of the shapes we would cover for this project. I then had them draw their first draft of what they wanted their sculpture to look like. Many students took a long time, mostly because they had no idea about what inspired them.
There was one student, who mostly sleeps in my class, but when I had them do this, she came up to my desk and asked for help on what to draw. I had noticed that she drew a lot, when she was not sleeping, and asked her what she draw. She said she liked to draw people, so I told her that she should draw a person, with a geometric twist on it. So she did, and it is beautiful, I cannot wait for her to tweak her design and have it come to life. |
What I enjoyed the most was how much I was getting to know some of them. I really got to see their interests come out in these projects.
Students were asked to put together a presentation that includes a description of why they chose to build what they did, the math in the sculpture, and a reflection of the most and least challenging parts of this project. Students presented to a small group of their peers at a time. The audience rotated and they had a rubric, attached to the right, that they had to fill out for each presenter. During one of the presentations, I overheard the best conversation. Presenter: I have trapezoids and rectangles. Evaluator: That's a square, not a rectangle. Presenter: No, the sides are not all the same length. This conversation was between two students who do not always pay attention in class, or do their homework. I was very excited when I heard the presenter back up why she believed her shapes were rectangles with mathematical reasoning. |
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