Becoming an Abacist - Middle School Math Project

I start the most years with numeration and understanding the number system.  I found that they enjoy starting the year with a project and get right into it.  I thought of this one summer and shared the idea with a few teachers (strangely a friend of mine thought of the same idea and planned the same project without us sharing it).  The idea is that we build an abacus or actually we made a soroban and learned out to use it properly. 

We used some youtube videos to help understand the sorobans and the students went to work making the abacus. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px_hvzYS3_Y&feature=share&list=FLb3QBPNaCFvuf1dE-FddGdA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvsnftXXKdw&feature=share&list=FLb3QBPNaCFvuf1dE-FddGdA



We used beads and thread and different shoeboxes but many of them turned out to be too big to use well.  The successful ones were made from box tops or lids and a few students used wooden skewers instead of thread.  I will post pictures of examples soon.

My friend used a popsicle stick method and was happy with those.

In designing and creating them the students were suddenly also using some measurement as well to put it together.  It was quite fun watching how the students built there own. 

The biggest benefit of using this project was that the students started to understand what base 10 measnt because of the nature of the abacus.  We also worked on adding and subtracting with an abacus and the students began naturally understanding why we line up the columns when using these operations.

Here is the criteria sheet that I gave the students: It is also free at my  TPT link:

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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.