Assessment (2008-2009)
French teachers
Mathematics
A popular myth about chess
Having told Sissa's story to the pupils, I asked them to guess the number of grains that were put on the very last square.
Then, on a chess that was displayed at the back of the room, they wrote the number of wheat grains in each square. This activity took place throughout a whole month so that each student could participate and so that the work was not off-putting. Of course, no calculators were allowed. I somehow regret not having allowed them for the last raws as the pupils could have realised that calculators have limits.
Each pupil was keen on participating to the project, even if they are not calculus' lovers in general.
Our sprinters
It was the first time for these pupils were using a spreadsheet, so I had to prepare the sheet table with wrong data and graph.
How much does it cost?
I thought about this activity having noticed that several pupils were facing difficulties in resolving a textbook's exercise about the exchange of the Swiss franc. Our two countries, with which we have a partenership, use a currency which is not the euro, and that made the activity become very interesting.
Density of the population in the European Union
It is just after having received four cards published by the European Parliement, which indicated each country's population's superficy, that I thought of this activity. It allowed me to go through basic knowledge the pupils had learned in geography two months before, and to do a group work as each pupil had to write down a division and verify his classmate's one. |