Applying Plotting Ordered Pairs: Mathica Monster Activity

Mathica Monster

I was trying to figure out how to make an engaging lesson to help my students apply their graphing of ordered pairs skills and I think I have made a fun and entertaining lesson! In this activity students work as partners to plot coordinates of various places in "Scarytown" in order to help Mathica Monster find her way around. I like to try to make math fun for the kids because I think this makes both your day and theirs go much faster and helps to limit excessive behavior problems.

This lesson really helped students to understand the concept of distance between points on a coordinate plane and to apply graphing ordered pairs in relationship to other positions. Even though this year has been tough because we are transitioning to a new and more deep curriculum, I have seen some positive strides over the course of the year from when I first started working with my students to now. It takes time to help students learn how to apply math rather than merely complete basic skills. I am excited to see how I can grow as a teacher and how my students in the future will benefit from going deeper into the math concepts. This blog is my way of reflecting and sharing my ideas of what works with my fellow educators. This was definitely a lesson that I felt enriched the students' understanding of this concept. This lesson can be found at my TpT store for FREE please stop by and browse some of my other resources. If you like what you see please FOLLOW ME.

Here is a video preview of the Mathica Monster Lesson. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you come back!



Reflecting Ordered Pairs Across the Axes: A Hands On Activity Using Mirrors

It has been a while since I have written a blog entry. (Snow days and state testing has backed a lot of my lesson planning up). I am very excited to write about a recent lesson that I completed with my students that involved reflecting across the x and y-axis.

In this lesson, students discovered the mathematical patterns behind reflecting ordered pairs and collections of ordered pairs across the x-axis and y-axis. The students used mirrors to help them see what was happening. It was a lot of fun watching them discover this and it was rewarding to even see my lower ability classes coming up with some amazing observations. (View the video to see this lesson in action.)

Students started out with a short video showing them how to use the mirrors to reflect across each axis.

 

 

 

Here are some glimpses of some of the notes sheets that were featured in the above video.

 

A similar lesson to this would not be difficult to create, however if you like what you see on this blog, the lesson is available at my TpT site and can be viewed here. Thank you for taking time to view this lesson, it was very fun to teach and the students got a very good understanding of it.