Yingying's Math Teaching
Teaching math for a thoughtful world!
Scaling Self-Portrait
Content area
Middle School Math, 7th-grade
Unit: Scale Drawings
California content standard(s)
Draw construct, and describe geometrical figures and describe the relationships between them.
Solve problems involving scale drawings of geometric figures, including computing actual lengths and areas from a scale drawing and reproducing a scale drawing at a different scale.
Unit goal(s)
Describe how scaling affects lengths, angles, and areas in scaled copies.
Use scale factors to create and compare scaled copies.
Represent distances in the real world using scales and scale drawings.
What we did in this unit?
Lauch by cooking rice: In order to help students understand scale factor, we launch the unit by introducing recipes of cooking rice and asked students to help us to determin how much water and rice we need in order to cook rice for everyone in our class. We cooked rice in front of everyone and used their recipe that they worked collaboratively with eachother and invited everyone to eat their rice at noon.
Practice on Desmos: In the coming lessons, we gave students more opportunities to practice on Desmos to draw scaling roberts that they are interested in. They need to work with their partners so that they have more opportunity to talk math and share their strategies with each other.
Draw Scaling self-portrait: We asked students to collaboratively work together to draw scaling self-portrait. Students work with their partners to measure their body and then according to the scale factor we gave them, they calculated the right scaling data and then draw sclaing self-portrait.
Art Gallery: For exhibition, students show their drawings to their classmates, and receive either heart (meaning liked) or question mark(meaning I don’t think this is quite right of your size) from their peers.
Why we did this?
Learn by hands, heart and minds. In this unit, students are eating, calculating, drawing and giving each other feedback. They used math to enjoy life, discover themselves, and draw themselves in a way that they never did before.
Make math relevant. It’s important for students to see that math can help them cook better, get to know themselves better and discover the world in a new way.
Cultive virtues. Students need to work together, share different ideas, listen to each other and give each other feedback.
Reflection
To make a high-quality product, next time, I will have students refine their works after having critique and feedback, just like what Ron Berger mentioned in Austin’s butterfly.
I will ask students to give feedback with more specific, helpful details so that kids know how to do a better job.
