Zombies and Exponential Functions

Hi everyone,

In my teacher’s college math course, we are continuing to present lesson-learning activities and I am thoroughly enjoying all the creative and insightful ideas being offered. This week in class, my fellow teacher candidates had the opportunity to work with the grade eleven curriculum and being a course I personally enjoyed, I was extremely excited for their lessons. This week, I would like to focus on the learning activity where the class was introduced to exponential functions through a series of stations.

 

During this ‘action’ component of the lesson, the class was divided into small groups and instructed to move to a series of stations. As shown in the picture on the right, there was instructions and counters at each station. On the worksheet, students are required to create a table and graph and the lesson concluded with reflection questions that were taken up as a class. I really like how this lesson fostered student communication and problem solving skills. With my group members, I worked collaboratively to solve the problems while discussing our mathematical reasoning. I believe it is very important to encourage students to share their thinking process out loud, in addition to the traditional paper and pencil techniques.  

Regardless of the subject, it is important educators take the time to know their students in order to make content relevant and meaningful for the unique learners in their class. In doing so, educators are demonstrating their commitment to student success, as well as demonstrating they care about what’s going in their student’s lives. I thought this was exemplified exceptionally during this lesson. The activities included the themes of zombies, the ice bucket challenge, and folding paper (which was actually completed on myth busters). Although it may be ‘simple,’ by taking the time to invest in and understand your student’s interests, it’s the difference between a normal lesson and an engaging and interesting lesson. The only suggestion I can offer for this lesson is ensuring students understand that they are not adding on to the number of “something per day.”  While the instruction sheet clearly indicated that the table was based on the number of zombies each day, based on my groups knowledge of zombies (i.e. from movies or books) they had a difficult time not adding on to the number of existing zombies. Although extremely minor, this is something I would not thought of unless my group members mentioned it it. I personally do not always enjoy using manipulatives to demonstrate my understanding; I found the use of counters really helped me visualize the pattern from ‘day-to-day’ within the table. This activity reinforced the importance of differentiated instruction, as well as adjusting your teaching style to meet the varying needs of learners within the classroom.

Although a university student, I still found this activity extremely engaging and therefore is definitely something I can see myself using in my future classroom.

Until next time,
Rachelle