Holiday Feast - Math Project

Heading into the holiday season is a great time to motivate students.  There are many ways that allow students to realize that the holiday season my be fun but can be costly.  In this project I have the students completely plan a holdiay dinner event.  I have them organize and cost out the entire day including figuring out the taxes that are incurred.  Here is the criteria that I am using this year.

Fraction Know it All - Math Resource

One of the concepts I truly believe in is that you must continue working on important elements of the curriculum all year around.  Working on a unit in math such as fractions at the beginning of the year and then not really focusing on it again until the next year can really bring about difficulties for the students.  That instant recall after not seeing it for a long time is almost impossible for many students.  One of the things that I have tried to bring to my math class is responsibility for all math concepts at any time.  Even though we go through units with specific math themes we also try to work on all the math concepts all year as well.  The way I accomplish this is through the opening minutes of the class.  The warm-up or sponge activity when the students come through the door.  Each day has some kind of different theme.  The following is what my students get every Monday morning when they enter the class.  It is the Fraction Know-It-All and it basically goes over many of the important elements of understanding fractions, decimals and percents and how they are connected. 

Here is the downloadable copy.  Fraction Know It All

At the beginning of the year it takes a little bit of time to teach but because I know that we are going to continue this all year I don't feel the pressure to explain everything all at once.  I have the students show 3 equivalent fractions, the decimal, the percent, draw a diagram of what it should look like and place it on a number line.  I put a student's example below so that you can see the basic results.  I have them do 2 different fractions at a time.

 

 

Supporting a Family - Middle School Math project

This project idea came out of trying to have awareness for needy families.  I have tried different versions of this project many times and have had success in every way with it.  The students really love this project.  They get the chance to bring in advertisements, catalogs and flyers as well as shopping online.  They really enjoy the challenge of trying to shop for a family and helping them out.  I have done this around Christmas time with a lot of success.  The students learn about adding, subtracting and multiplying with decimals, staying within a budget and about how much presents cost during the holiday season.  We also added in pricing out all the materials for Christmas dinner and this year actually took our classes to the local grocery store to price it all out.  The people working there were awesome and taught our kids about what gets taxed and what doesn't.    What I genreally do is create many different types of needy families and make some more challenging than others and then selectively distribute them to the kids. 

The displays and creativity of the procjects coming in have been amazing.  Christmas trees, stockings, prezis, powerpoints, posters, mock presents have all been parts of projects recieved during this project.  I have also been amazed at how seriously most students take this and often have them come to me with coupons and deals that they have found.  I usually accept all of them but the students have to show the calculations on how much savings there are.

Here is one of the criteria sheets I give.  All the criteria sheets are here.