Starting A Unit - What Do They Know: Part Two

As a follow up to the previous lesson, Brian turned to the ONAP 6 package he has (available through Nelson Canada) to help him get some ideas on where to go next.  They have a pattern matching game that he decided to use with the students to get them looking more in depth at what a pattern is, and the different ways you can represent a pattern.  Using his ELMO, Brian demonstrated how to play the game, but also had the students talk about what they were seeing on each card and what knowledge they could use to determine if it was a match.  (The cards represent patterns in four ways:  Table of values, in a model, a pattern rule (in words) and in number pattern form).

After the student's did that, he had each student select a pair that they had successfully found.  His question to them was "How do you know your cards match? Justify your answer."  He then modeled for them how to write an answer that involves them justifying their answer.  He then had the students re-read the answer and point out what key math vocabulary words were that should be in a good answer.

He differentiated the lesson by having students do this for either one or two pairs (so the struggling students could focus more on the quality of their work than the quantity of their work) and also had students who were finished quickly then make another representation of the pattern. 

For students who finished one answer fairly quickly, descriptive feedback was given to them so that they could use it on the next answer.  The pictures below show the different responses and the different descriptive feedback that was given: (My apologies for the upside down photo, just click on it and then rotate it on your desktop.  A new camera is coming!)

Brian also used the Assessment for Learning Tool (A4L) to help him as he read over the student's work to keep track of the vocabulary words they were using, and to see if anyone was incorrectly using a word or a term.  His next lesson will be to administer the ONAP questions to his students to then help give him a more concrete idea of where they have a lot of content knowledge, and where they are still struggling.