Next week is Catholic Schools Week. I love Catholic Schools Week and all the fun and events that go along with it! What I don’t love, though, is putting together bulletin boards to display student work for our Open House on Sunday.
I know many teachers really get into decorating their classrooms and putting up fun bulletin boards. I am not one of those teachers. I love to teach and plan meaningful lessons, but coming up with bulletin board ideas is soo not my cup of tea! I don’t do a lot of artsy projects in my math classes so I find it challenging to come up with student work samples to display.
I have been working on percents with my 7th graders for the past couple of weeks, so I decided to turn my absolute favorite aspect of math (problem solving) into a bulletin board idea. I had the students write their own, original percent word problems that related to something in their lives in class on Friday. They had to type the problems for homework, title them, and add pictures that related to the problems. I had them solve the problems, as well, showing all of their work.
I got a great variety of problems from the students and they were very creative with them! A couple of examples of the types of word problems I got were:
- From a girl who just got a new dog – Which is the better buy: a puppy that costs $399, but is on sale for 15% off or a puppy that costs $335 plus 7% sales tax?
- From a boy who plays baseball – If I get a hit 24% of the time I go up to bat, how many hits would you expect me to get if I went up to bat 80 times?
They came out really cute with the pictures, too. I haven’t gotten around to hanging them up yet, but it’s on my to-do list for tomorrow.
If you are interested in the project, click on the image below to download the assignment.
Anything that gets the students to make real-world connections to the math they are learning in school is good in my book! I’m thinking about putting some of the students’ word problems on their percent test next week, too.
Thanks for reading,
Christina
