Diary of a TLLP Journey - CodeXPlosion

Today I met with the other members of the TLLP team.  We had great aspirations in creating a few new lessons, not only for grade 9, but looking forward to grade 10 and beyond.  We decided to start our day with creating activity using the micro:bits as we have not used them yet in math.  We had previously discussed creating an activity for linear and non-linear patterns, but it hadn't really formalized and so this was our chance. Debbie and I both had different activity ideas and we started out working on them separately. Dianne was also trying different patterning coding options, but also carefully moderating, asking Debbie and I questions, checking to make sure what we were doing made sense, looking for overlaps, etc, etc... My idea was to create 7 different programs, one for each micro:bit, which would be one per group, that would display different linear and non-linear patterns.  Each group would get a micro:bit, determine if the pattern displayed was linear o...

At the beginning of the semester I asked my 1P class about their thoughts of math and this was the exchange with one of my students: Student: "I am scared of math".   Me: “What are you scared of in Math?” Student: “Numbers" Me: “What is scary about the number 5?” Student: “It has curves and straight lines” I was thinking that I had my work cut out for me.   At first, this student didn’t do very much, I mistakenly thought it was because they were totally disengaged, but I soon realized this wasn’t the case.   They were observing and thinking and processing a lot of information in their head. After a couple of weeks, this student would start to share an idea and would say “But, I am wrong”.   I would encourage them to continue sharing and as it turned out, no, they weren’t wrong, in fact they were correct.   I kept reminding them that they had good instincts and to trust them.   A couple of weeks after that the language c...