Dani+Snyder

Hey everyone! My name is Dani Snyder and I am a senior at Clemson University. I plan to graduate this year and become a math teacher. I want to be a math teacher because providing an environment where students can learn and grow will be an fun experience. Currently, I am student teaching in 9th grade at Wren High School, observing algebra, geometry and math tech classes.

For a link to my unit plan click here.

__Got Math__?

This is just a funny video from [|Teacher Tube] about reasons why it is important to know math!

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[|Real World Math] is website that has various lesson plans that use Google Earth to help students explore different mathematical concepts using real world examples. All of the lessons on this site are really interesting and will keep the students engaged while learning valuable information. One of the lessons that I really liked is reviewed below. Take a look...

__[|U-Boat Hunt]__ - Project Based Learning for Grades 6 to 8



This lesson is a series of puzzles for students to solve. The students are given a message of random letters to decipher. They have to recognize the patterns among the letters using inductive reasoning. After theyProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 0solve it, they will know the position of a U-Boat to destroy. Basically during this lesson they have to find all the of the U-BoaProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 oxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 oxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 by completing math puzzles.

ThisProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 0lesson will be very interesting for%Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 the students, and will keep them entertained and excited about learning math. I think that they will also be learning about understanding patterns, and improving their ability to communicate solutions. This activity is also good because it connects math with other subjects. The positions of the U-Boats that the students discover are real historical positions that U-Boats were found and the lesson includes a final map on Google Earth of all the coordinates. So a student that enjoys history, geography will be excited about this lesson, too.

One thing I disliked about this lesson is it is extremely long. The puzzles may take a long time for students to decipher. This means that I would have to make this a team activity, so they could split the notes and complete it much faster. Another problem I had with this lesson is finding a concrete connection between what is learned and how it would fit into a middle school math curriculum. Making sure the tasks done by my students are worthwhile is important because time is constrained in the classroom.

This lesson would be appropriate for my future classroom if I am a middle school or 9th grade teacher. However, this lesson would be too easy for high school students and the lesson would not be be useful. In order to make this lesson better i would suggest involving cooperative learning (group work). Next, I might want to make it shorter, so it would take up less time. This would mean making the amount of U-Boats smaller. Also, I think it would be good for the patterns to start out easy and progressively get herder, as opposed to all the puzzles being at about the same level like it is now.

To view the full U-Boat lesson plan click here.

__Google Sketch Up__

I think that this a really great tool to use for math classes. First of all, it will keep the students interested and engaged in the activities that they are completing in class. Next, the visual aspects of Google sketch up can be really helpful in helping students understand a problem. Lastly, there are many creative **real life** problems that can be made from Google sketch up which helps students feel like they are doing something worthwhile.

Here is the problem that i created using Google Sketch Up for a high school class: