11.17.2012

#myfavfriday Whiteboards and Pipe Cleaners


My favorite thing is having four whiteboards in my classroom. I want to say wall to wall but that's not quite accurate. I love having one next to the SMART board so I can display things and still have a space to write on. I love that I can send almost all of my classes to the board when I run out of lesson or I didn't plan anything spectacular. Super nifty.




I also loved this spur of the moment idea I had the other day. My students are struggling with looking at an equation and being able to graph the transformations so I bought some pipe cleaners and used the graph side of my white boards. I wrote a parent function on the board and added one transformation at a time.




As I wrote the transformation, they manipulated the pipe cleaner on the board. This really clicked for some of the students. One student said "Well, why didn't we do this in the first place?" and another student "This is soooo easy."

Success.

7 comments:

  1. Pipe cleaners...YEAH BUDDDYYYY! Great idea for transformations.

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  2. Great - and inexpensive - idea! I'm also curious about the huge eye on that one dry erase board...?!

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    1. A student drew that and wrote "Ms. Miller's watching from every angle" and I thought it was appropriate. Lol

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  3. I am so excited about teaching absolute value transformations now in Algebra 1. Thank you for sharing another one of your brilliant ideas!

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  4. We are just finishing up a unit on parent graphs and their transformations. I am using this today as part of the review. Thanks!

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  5. Glad that you all think it's a good idea!

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  6. Can you explain the transformations with the pipe cleaners a little more? I can't seem to connect how bending the pipe cleaner can represent a transformation...maybe I'm just tired.

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