Learning Activities: Week 6

We had another good round of lesson plans this week in my course Teaching Mathematics I/S.  There are so many different ways that we can engage students in their learning and tailor to different student learning.  I want to specifically talk about one of the learning activities that we participated in.

One of the activities focused on Proportional Reasoning in course MEL4E: Mathematics for Work and Everyday Life.  Students were given a printout of a floor plan, a worksheet to guide them through the activity, and a large variety of different floor material (hardwood, carpet, tiles, etc.) with different prices on each.  There was also a selection of paint samples.  For this activity, students had to choose three rooms from the floor plan to redesign the floor and the walls.  Each group of students would choose the new floor and/or paint colour they wanted to use for that room, and then use the price per square foot to determine how much their redesign would cost.

There were multiple aspects of this activity that made it very effective and engaging.  One of the first things I noticed was the very large amount of physical material that students had access to.  Instead of simply giving students a list of the different materials to choose from and the prices, the teacher supplied the physical floor samples and paint samples for students to use during the activity.  This makes the activity so much more engaging because students can use the samples to help them visualize what material they want in their home.  The different prices of the material were also very realistic (for example, the hardwood flooring was more expensive than the vinyl plank), allowing students to recognize how prices differ in the real world.  We were also able to further relate this activity to real life by choosing flooring based on our own personalities.  For example, my group decided that we were going to have a dog so we decided on vinyl plank instead of hardwood so the dog would not ruin the nice (and expensive!) hardwood.

Another aspect I liked about this activity was that it could be used for students at multiple different levels of learning.  How the floor plan is designed allows for many different levels of difficulty for solving proportional reasoning problems.  Students were only required to choose three rooms to redesign; thus, students could choose rooms based on their current level of learning.  Some of the rooms were simply rectangles or squares (e.g. closet, master bathroom, living room), whereas other rooms were irregular shapes (e.g. kitchen, bedroom #2, foyer), requiring multiple calculations to solve the problem.  This encourages students to work at their own level, and therefore allowing everyone to be successful.  In addition, students could try different levels of difficulty, perhaps starting with simple rooms, and progressively trying harder rooms.

There is not much that I would change about this activity.  I believe that it is an excellent activity, tailoring to different learning styles and learning strengths.  One thing that was mentioned in class was the idea of incorporating a budget into this activity.  I believe that this would be a very good extension activity to do with students.  This would simply add another aspect of the activity, making it more engaging and challenging, as well as more realistic.