Experiencing Proportions

My fifth grade class just started a unit on ratios and proportions.  This is fairly new vocabulary to them, although students have used proportions before.  They’ve used them before to convert measurements and fractions, as well as other items.  They weren’t called proportions at that time.  Instead, I remember discussing them as conversions or creating equivalent fractions.

So, on Tuesday the class was formally introduced to proportions.  I started off by using a Brainpop video that helped introduce the concept.  We watched the video twice and answered the quiz as a class.  Through this process it seemed as though students were starting to become more familiar with proportions.

The class then picked up their math reflection journals.  The class completed a few proportion examples.  They were able to use a few different strategies to complete the proportions and seemed most comfortable by using a cross-multiply and solve for x strategy.  Maybe so, because that’s what’s fresh in their minds from a past pre-algebra unit.  We continued to work on a few different math journal pages.  The majority of students were starting to pick a strategy to solve the proportions.  Although most were feeling confident about proportions, I had a group of students that were having trouble.  I decided to reach out to a few different people about proportions and found the Tweet below.

After reviewing the documents, I decided to try out the Illuminations activity with my kids.  I brought all the kids to the front of the classroom and explained that they will be solving a mystery.  The kids were stoked.  I had to go over the directions multiple times, but after around 1o minutes I believe they were all on board.  I put the students in teams.  I then told them that not all students would be catching the same culprit.  Students were confused about this, but I thought it added a wrinkle to the activity.  I passed out the sheets to the students and they were off to working on their own.

Almost all of the teams had questions about how to proceed.  I had the teams tackle the problems on their own for the first ten minutes.  Fortunately, teams started to show some perseverance and solved the first problem based on the clue that they were provided.  The teams used the strategies discussed earlier in their journal pages.  After around 20 minutes I had teams starting to come up to me with their final answer.  I gave them a thumbs up or thumbs down.  If they didn’t have the right culprit I asked them to redo a specific question that would move them in the right direction.

I feel like this was an activity that helped students become more aware of proportions and how to solve them.  The overall goal was successful, although I need to reflect on some of the team dynamics that played out.  Not all the teams worked well together.  Some students were more confident than others, and some students wanted to let others do the majority of the work.  I think this tends to happen in varying degrees during group work.  Although this happened, I still feel that the student conversations added to activity.  The ideas and strategies that were being discussed seemed to benefit all involved.

 

Next week I’ll be using the questions to have the students reflect on this activity.