Mathalicious New-Tritional Info Lesson – CC Math 6, units, calorie burn rates, celebrities, and oh, yeah, BURGERS!

DAY 1 - Tuesday

We started Mathalicious' New-Tritional Info today in my Math 6 class. We are not a fast-paced group, so it is going to take us more time to get through the lesson. We spent Tuesday working on Act 1 of the basic lesson.

I would echo everything my friend the inimitable Julie Reulbach had to say about the Mathalicious pacing and student worksheets. As Julie says,

I have to give a shout out to Mathalicious lessons right now.  I’m impressed with the way the student sheets are structured.  The directions are very clear and accessible to students so they can get right to work without tons of questions or further explanation from me.  This allows me to walk around and observe so I can see where my students are and help the ones that are struggling.  The questions also progress in the lesson so that students use their previous work to make discoveries.  This is really tough to do when creating lessons.  Kudos guys!

A couple of students were quicker than others to catch on, so I gave them the off-the-cuff extension idea to research online the calorie "burn rate" values of other activities such as singing (since Selena Gomez was the first example person given in the table). Once we found the burn rate, I divided those by the given poundage of the person performing the activity, and voilà – we had the burn rate per pound per minute. It was rather low – like around 0.0114 calories per pound for 1 minute worth of singing.

Then I had those students go back through the table and figure out how many calories Justin would burn by singing, how many Abby would burn, and how many LeBron would burn. The kids enjoyed imagining LeBron singing and figuring out his calorie-burning for that combination.

You could add on any variety of activities for this extension, such as kazoo-playing, knitting, thinking, etc. It gave the faster students a job to do (finding and converting) and it gave the slower students an incentive to hurry their little butts up on what they needed to focus on (can you spell "sixth graders"???).

A strange thing happened in my second class (5th period). An argument broke out between two factions: one who believed with all their hearts that Larry Bird had come along and stolen LeBron's lunch, and another faction that believed with equal vehemence that it was, in fact, former President Bill Clinton who had skipped out with the lunch at the end of the commercial.

Everyone in this class (except me) was born in 2002, so they probably aren't the most reliable eyewitnesses in the world. But I thought it was interesting how many of them insisted that the lunch-filcher was Bill Clinton.

Anyway, food for thought.

DAY 2 – Block Day

We worked on side 2 of the New-Tritional Info worksheet today. Students were more confident today with the various units, burn rates, unit rate conversions, and corresponding activities. For my classes, this was a good pace.

Tomorrow is our other Block Day, so I'll do the same lesson with my other 6th grade class.

Can't wait to integrate Julie's Desmos ideas and extensions next week!