Pi Day

We are heading straight into the dog days of school.  Testing is nigh and we teachers and librarians often find ourselves in survival mode.  This is the attitude that I entered into our final week of Math Stations with.  I'm not proud of that.

But what I am proud of is that learning occurs in spite of my best efforts to screw it up.  This is what I call a little school magic.  You've had it happen to you before.  You put something together in hopes to check another thing off of a never ending list of things to get done.  And then it happens.  Your measly offering of a basket of fishes and loaves explodes into something fulfilling and beautiful.

In truth, that is really what happened for our Pi Day celebration.

Mrs. Smith and I started out grandiose plans for 4-5 stations and lists of all the items we would have to gather to make it happen.  Then little by little, we whittled away the excess and paired it down, perhaps due to sheer exhaustion and lack of time to plan, to two stations that would take minimal effort on our part.  Survival mode at its best.

Little did we know that the kids would take it and run with it and it would become by far, my favorite station day that we have done in the whole series.

Kids are like that you know.  If you just get that one influential student to buy into what you are doing, you have won them all.  And that is exactly what happened on our 2nd annual Pi Day celebration.

We decided upon two activites.  Seventh and eighth graders have a developmental math class in the afternoons in addition to their regular math classes, so we could afford lots of time for these two activities.

Activity #1 (45 minutes)

One being a Kahoot, interactive online activity.  For this activity, there could only be one top dog. And that winner would get a FREE Snappy's chicken dinner from our local food joint.  Second place won $3.14 (Ha! Clever, huh!). To begin with, I printed out the questions that all revolved around Pi and facts and information regarding this mathematical concept.  Students were given 10 minutes to research these questions online.  When the 10 minutes was up, we had students go to Kahoot.it on their laptop and join our online quiz.  this interactive tech tool forces students to not only get the answer right in order to win, they have to buzz in the fastest.  The race was on, and the students meant serious business.  They had a great time and learned a lot about Pi along the way.  It is simply amazing how the promise of a few chicken strips can really motivate teenagers.

Activity #2 (45 minutes)

Our second activity was a ginormous group effort to build a Pi chain that would wrap around our corridor.  We printed out several pages of the never ending number Pi and chopped it up, giving each pair a section.  Each number was assigned a color. Students would grab strips of paper and complete a color/chain representation of their section of Pi.  Okay, so what I first thought would be a completely lackluster activity became the highlight of the day.  These kids really REALLY got into this chain making, cranking out one after another.  So much so that we were overwhelmed trying to keep them in order and get them all strung together.   They were busy little bees.  Each student had a job and was working efficiently, like a well oiled Pi chain making machine.  The buzzing activity in the library media center was just so cool. So cool that one 7th grade student asked if he could take out his phone and take some video.  I said sure! Then he preceded to tell me he would upload it to his Youtube channel.  Well, who even knew little Mikey had a Youtube channel! The students ended up generating a huge chain that is now taped to the walls of our hallways and lobby. Mrs. Smith and I are so proud of them for working so hard.  

  

What a great ending to our series of math stations!  I think the kids learned a lot and I even learned a lot about myself.  

1.  I can do math!!!! You can teach an old dog new tricks!!! 

2. Mrs. Smith is an amazing math teacher.  She is never allowed to leave us.

3. We have great students here at South Side who are open and eager to try new things.

4. While it was a lot of HARD WORK and towards the end Mrs. Smith and I were losing energy...it was definitely worth it and  I want to do this again next year.

I hope this has given you a glimpse into what we are doing here in our library.  

Until Next Time,

Amy Hutto

Library Media Specialist

South Side High School

Bee Branch, AR

Math Centers: Week 5

There is something about seeing the kid who is your most challenging one, the one who is bored with EVERYTHING, the kid who is your class clown, really, really (no I mean REALLY) get into logic puzzles. I mean take a kid who might not have turned in any assignment the whole year and  give him a logic puzzle and watch him melt into a puddle of mathematical genius.

That is what happened this week during math centers.  Sometimes you just have to find that one thing that really interests a kid and then you feed it and feed it as long as it will last.

And that my friends, feels like victory.

We actually had three centers going on this week.  Students spent 15 minutes in each center.  They all responded well to what we had to offer in our math centers this week.

Station 1

Logic Puzzles were the name of the game in station one.  Some students worked together and others wanted to do their own.  Some took all 15 minutes to figure one out, and still others completed almost every one that I had in that 15 minutes.  The ones that we picked were not super difficult, although next year I think we should add in some different levels for those that were really good at these.  We also allowed some to do Sudoku.

Station 2

Our second station was a game made out of bottle caps where students raced against each other to match decimals and fractions.

Station 3

In this station, students worked in pairs to play Roll..Flip...and Solve polynomial equations.  they would roll two die to see what the polynomials were and then they would flip a token to see if they should add or subtract them.  Then, they would solve.

Coming soon...Pi Day!

Until Next Time,

Amy Hutto

Library Media Specialist

South Side High School