Day 73 - Summative Prep Begins

Day 73

This week is all about summative preparation. In our board (district) all grade 10 academic and applied students write a board-wide summative task and a board-wide exam. Next week my students will be doing their summative, which focuses on the mathematical process expectations (similar to SMP in the US). Alex Overwijk created this summative prep and blogged about it here. We tweaked it a bit at our last meeting, but the credit definitely goes to him.

Students walked in to find their names in groups (chosen randomly) on the board and papers awaiting them at the tables. Each group had a set of pictures, an envelope along with the names of the members of the group and their "home station". Here are the pictures with which they worked:

I explained to them that everything was colour coded. Each group would be working on a particular colour of paper and with one marker. Their first job today was to come up with as many questions as they could for each station. They started at their home station, placed their questions in the envelope when they finished then moved on to the next station. They weren't all completely on-board with this process. This was also the first time that many students complained about the groups. I can't even say how many times I said "Please put your phone away" today. I even confiscated two phones, which rarely happens. With a little encouragement from me, most wrote down some decent questions. I need to think about how I can get better questions out of them if (when) I do this again. I am sure that if more than 5 of them had been in class on the day we did the tree activity, it would have helped.

This process continued until they had all been to every station. Here are the questions they came up with:

Next, they had to classify the questions at their home station by curriculum expectation (each group again got the same colour of paper). Some questions were not mathematical in nature, so could be ignored. Some questions were repeated by all groups. Some of the curriculum was not represented by any questions so they could look at the pictures again to see if they could find any questions that would fit. When they finished at their home station they put all the questions back in the envelope and moved on to the next station. They got through 3 stations today. To be continued tomorrow...