After writing Brain Mush, I felt like I was on fire and ready to write. Not sure what happened Tuesday through Friday, but it did feel like a whirlwind. I might say that the pace was constantly accelerating, and when the weekend hit, I needed to gather myself.
I ended up writing an initial plan for Unit 3 to kind of work things out. I used a mixture of the materials already found through the modelinginstruction.org site and stuff that I randomly found in my own Google Drive. What I really liked about how I’ve laid it out is highlighting the questions that students can answer during whiteboarding sessions. My most recent focus is how the whiteboarding discussion sessions go. One of the strategies I enjoyed was having students ask questions of each other’s boards. I’ve had students do this in the past, and they use the question, “Why did you choose to do it this way?” the most. The answering group would get off easily with “I don’t know. We just did.” I’d like to make the questioning and answering portion a richer discussion where students actually end up learning something from it.
I used to dislike this unit so much because of how quickly it hits. I’ve barely finished grading tests and retests from the previous unit and then I feel like this unit is over. With the addition of the programming pieces, there will be more thinking about the computational aspect of acceleration, but there will also be some breathing room (I’m hoping) with the grading between assessments.
Learning with Ms. Medrano 