"Upgrade the Worksheet" - My Humble Attempt

Since really diving into professional development networking on Twitter over this past summer I've come across so many fantastic ideas, many of which have come from the same set of amazing educators. Weeks ago I ran across one of many great ideas on Alice Keeler's Teacher Tech website (via a tweet): a post encouraging us to Upgrade the Worksheet. For elementary math teachers, it's a great way to engage students in an authentic critical thinking experience as they practice place value skills.

Of course I ran across this post just a few days too late to actually use it in my class (though it's filed away for review time and for next year!). Thankfully, though, it put that seed in my head that kept nagging at me to create a good "math lab" of my own.

Here's the result (as well as a link so you can make your own copy):



NOTE: Wondering about how to share a document that automatically prompts others to make a copy? Yup, that's Alice Keeler's help too, in this tutorial.

My students that will be working on this activity have just been introduced to multiplying whole numbers by decimals, and it's time for some good practice. This should do the trick. It's also a great opportunity to have the discussion that multiplying by a decimal is like talking about "parts," "percents," or "fractions of the whole." With a decimal as one of the factors, the product should be smaller than where you started. If you were to visit a smaller planet with less gravitational pull, your weight should be less than it is on Earth. That's a nice visual way for students to think about this concept.

We're fitting this activity in to the day before Thanksgiving break, so 40 minutes is really all the time it's going to be able to take. My students have very little experience with spreadsheets, so I'm hoping the format is user-friendly. One of the sheets allows them to check their answers - the best way to free up the teacher from having to constantly give directions and provide basic feedback just on facts. Students working on these problems can be a little more independent, allowing the teacher to work more closely with those needing greater skills development, or to ask more probing questions about a student's thought process.

The immediate action I'd take to really up the value of this activity is to have students do their own research to find the gravitational values of each solar system object on their own. Here's a link to a NASA site for those of you who'd like to do that. It could also give you a chance to review rounding if you'd like the students to have gravity values to the nearest hundredth.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving! I, for one, am deeply thankful for the ideas of other educators that consistently prompt me to do something a little bit better each time I share it with my students. I'm so humbled by the many educators who so freely share their great ideas with the rest of us. THANK YOU!!