Tag Archives: perplexity

Dig a Hole to China

The Description:

Show them this website and ask them if they can figure out what it is all about:

This site shows the exact opposite side of the earth from anywhere on earth.  So if you dug a hole straight down through the center of the earth, this site shows you were you would end up.  Every student in my class had heard the old saying about “dig a hole to China”, where it is believed that if you dug a hole straight through the earth, you would end up in China.  Apparently it’s not true, you would end up in the middle of the Atlantic.  Students will definitely ask you to find where you would need to start digging if you wanted to end up in China (Argentina).

That is about all you need to pose the question “If you were to dig a hole to China, how deep would the hole be?”

I give the students the circumference of the earth.   This lesson is teaching them to find the radius from the circumference.

C = 2(pi)r

The Advice:

At the end of class come back to the fact that if you give them radius, they would be able to give you diameter and circumference.  If you give them circumference, they should be able to give you radius and diameter.

The Goods:

I do not give any handouts.

Macro-Differentiation

These are a listing of hastags that I use to catagorize my lessons plans.  Each catagory represents a different style lesson plan.  My instructional goal is typically to make sure that I use each hashtag at least once a month.  The goal of this blog is to share all the lesson plans that I use under each hashtag.

My detailed lesson plans are my Keynote slides.  But along with those, I make a quick, calendar-style overview to me a general idea of what I am doing.  It’s on this calender where I place the hashtags at the bottom of each day.  This allows me  to quickly look back at what I have been doing, and know whether of not I am differentiating.  For example, here is two weeks worth of my lesson plans in geometry.  Notice that I can quickly see whether or not I have differentiated my instruction, without having to analyze each specific lesson plan.  The hashtags allow me to get a quick sense of what I have been doing, and what I have not been doing.

 

*Notes –

-The term “perplexity” is being used as described by Dan Meyer here