Day 3: Planning

Today the Second Life program was in operable because maintenence was being performed on it. So we decided to utilize the day for planning.

I suggested that we have Differentiated Lessons for the students using 3 tiers of students. We will differentiate the lessons based on tasks.

Lower Level Students
Students who need more background and foundational work concerning the tasks.

Average Students
Students who may have not been introduced to the task at hand, but whom have required previous knowledge.

Exceptional Students.
Students that may be above task and that are probably ready for problem solving either now, or after a refresher.

Since the lessons we are going to be discussing are heavily involved in Geometry we decided to start with Measuring a Line. We then discussed problems that our students may have while learning this lesson.

Problems That May Occur

• Meaning of measuring a line
• Differences in units (cm, inches)
• Some students may start at 1 on the ruler instead of 0
• Rounding
• What are the lines between each number?
• Basic understanding of fractions
• Not knowing what each mark is between each inch even with an understanding of fractions
• Mathematical language

We then thought about some practices that we could implement into a lesson

Practices

1. Teaching them about what a ruler looks like and asking them to draw it (at least the 4ths)
2. Making exercises that build on each other

• measuring three lines; constructing those three lines into a shape with a ruler; talking about triangles; discussing angles, etc.

We also wanted to to discuss fractions.

I then I drew on the white board some lessons that we could utilize Second life for. They involved the Formation of Shapes in 3-D using flying, and Introduction to Coordinates..

Formation of Shapes in 3-D

1. I thought about a creative way to build some stations in the sky to show the formation of a 3-D shapes. I will discuss the specifics of this in another lesson.

Introduction to Coordinates

I thought about building a grid of blocks where each block is a different color. Then using a starting point to get to each blocks by only going left, right, up or down. Then I thought of a series of questions I could ask.

1. How do I get to the #5 blue block from the starting block?
2. How many blocks left or right?
3. How many blocks up or down?
4. Would the directions change if I began at the alternate start?
5. Is it important to have a starting point? Why?
6. If I began at the starting block, went 2 blocks left, then 5 block up, which block would I end up at?

We're going to discuss my ideas tomorrow and how we could build them in Second Life.