Made 4 Math Monday: Great Graphing Marathon and B-day Happies

Happy #Made4Math Monday!  This is week 2 for me and I am so excited about this week's math project that I actually started it LAST Monday:)  A few weeks ago, I generated a list of ideas for active lessons (in anticipation of moving to block next year).  At the time, I had become a bit obsessed over SuPER sizing activities, thus the Great Graphing Marathon was conceived.

Let me first say that my students are not huge fans of plotting points, translating parent functions, or graphing in general.  So, I knew I needed to make it more fun to reinforce and practice graphing.   I thought, "How much more FuN can it get to be TrAnsForMed into "MaRatHon MenTaLity" as we create life size graphs with the students as the ordered pairs?!?" In this activity, students will be given a race number when they enter the room and safety pins to adhere the numbers to the backs of their shirts (my friend CM would say my inner elementary teacher is showing again :) *Correction: numbers on which they can work the problems to be graphed on the back of the print out.

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I will mark off a Cartesian plane with masking tape in our cafeteria (or chalk in the parking lot).  I have made up various functions that they will need to graph (quadratic, absolute value, and radicals, but anything would work) and I will show just one function at a time.  Students will plug their race number into the function and then graph themselves on the giant coordinate plane.  I realize some of the values will get pretty big and we will need to adjust how we count the marked squares. 

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In the spirit of #Made4Math Monday, I have created and printed both the race numbers and the functions, gathered my safety pins, and will make medals to hand out after the Marathon. Fingers crossed that they will like it!

It felt so good to get Project #1 done, I whipped up a second project: birthday happies.  For me, students' birthdays can be stressful, in that, I always find myself scrambling around trying to figure out something cute to give each one.  I do really great through September and then, I fall prey to the busy-ness of work and the rest of the kids get nada (which makes it look like I only like the August and September kids :/ ) Project #2 solved the problem.  They are all getting pop rocks.    Here's what I came up with...
First, a trip to the dollar store (Note: They don't take Mastercard, but they gladly accept buckets of change.)

Cut colored tissue paper into thirds.

Wrap each pop rock package in the tissue paper and secure paper with tape.  I found the dark colored packaging on the pop rocks showed through the yellow tissue paper.  So, I ended up using two pieces for the yellow packages.

Wrap a piece of black card stock around the package and then wrap the birthday printable (made using Microsoft Office Publisher) on top of the card stock.  I cut out a black paper starburst and the word "ROCKS" and hot glued it to the front of the wrapper.  Now, no more BirThDay ScRamBLe!