271 Fun with Baseball Stats Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 5–8 Professional Commentary: This lesson capitalizes on students' interest in sports to integrate instruction on fractions, decimals, percents, rounding, Cartesian coordinates, probability, and statistics. Students create their own game board using baseball card statistics and then play a simulated baseball game.... 272 Classic Middle-Grades Problems for the Classroom Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 5–8 Professional Commentary: This site focuses on the genre of problems in which successive fractional parts of a set are removed, and the size of the original set is determined from the final remainder. Four ways of solving such problems are illustrated and discussed.... 273 Polygon Capture: A Geometry Game Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 4–8 Professional Commentary: This game requires students to classify polygons according to more than one property at a time. Students identify shapes whose sides and angles satisfy specified criteria, and in so doing, move from a simple description of shapes to an analysis of how properties are related.... Career Fields: Agricultural & Environmental Systems, Construction Technologies, Manufacturing Technologies, Transportation Systems, General Career Skills Projects: Standards First Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–9 Professional Commentary: Students explore relationships among lines, slopes, and y-intercepts in a real-world context of printing textbooks. Students compare three pricing schedules by compiling data in tables and graphs.... Career Fields: Arts & Communication, Business & Administrative Services, General Career Skills Projects: COR, Standards First Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–8 Professional Commentary: In the Product Game, students start with factors and multiply to find the product. In The Factor Game, students start with a number and find its factors.... Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 5–9 Professional Commentary: Beginning with two consecutive numbers, and moving to numbers that differ by 2 and then by 3, students use arithmetic to develop the algebraic formula for factoring the difference of squares. Samples of student explanations of the formula are included.... 277 Students as Researchers: An Inclined Plane Activity Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–10 Professional Commentary: In this multiple-day activity, students measure the time it takes balls made of different materials to roll down inclines of varying lengths and heights, then make inferences about the relationship among the variables involved. Teachers are encouraged to act as facilitators while students decide which variables are important and can be measured, how best to collect the data, and how to interpret the results.... Career Fields: Engineering & Science Technologies Projects: Standards First 278 Real Estate Tycoon: Selling a Home and Investing the Profits Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 5–10 Professional Commentary: In this year-long project students design, "build," and "sell" a house, after which they simulate investment of the profits in the stock market. Along the way, students make scale drawings, compute with fractions and decimals in various contexts, and solve simple equations.... Career Fields: Business & Administrative Services, Construction Technologies Projects: Standards First 279 Finding Your Way Around Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–7 Professional Commentary: This lesson plan provides a wealth of ideas for introducing Cartesian coordinates to students. The teaching activities are organized around two major themes: finding one's way around in the plane and understanding how ordered pairs represent two variables that are changing simultaneously. Students use a city map to locate well-known landmarks. They learn to navigate two-dimensional space with online applets displaying the coordinate... 280 A Videotaping Project to Explore the Multiplication of Integers Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: Mathematics Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 5–8 Professional Commentary: In this lesson, multiplication of integers is presented in a format that encourages understanding, not simply rote memorization of rules. Using the rewinding of a videotape to represent negative time, students convince themselves that a negative rate times a negative time yields a positive distance.... Career Fields: Arts & Communication, Education & Training, Information Technology, General Career Skills Projects: Standards First |