Well, for me Barbie was definitely this week’s theme. Our school has an annual literacy conference, this year with a side-theme of numeracy, and I decided to run an NCTM activity called “Barbie goes Bungee-Jumping” which had been recommended by someone on the Middleweb listserv. So I spent early in the week collecting Barbies from various staff members who offered to bring some of their daughters' dolls – I ended up with close to 20, way more than I needed, so that was great.
Then on Thursday, I ran through the activity with both of my own math classes to work out the bugs since I’ve never done this activity before. The lesson, as it is on paper, takes two periods, about twice as long as I would have with the students at the conference, so the run-through helped me think of ways to simplify the lesson. Essentially, each group of kids had a Barbie and a “bungee cord” they made out of elastic bands. Using a long sheet of paper taped to the wall, they dropped Barbie from a certain height and kept track of how far she fell when the cord was two elastics long, four elastics long, six elastics long, etc. Then they had to predict how many elastics they’d need to give her a safe but thrilling drop from 380 cm, which is the height of the first landing in our school’s front stairwell. In the original lesson, this meant they had to create a chart with their data and then create a scatterplot graph, but by the day of the conference I’d boiled it down to them just making the chart and then using that alone to make an estimate (I had a lot of grade 6’s in each group plus a sprinkling of developmentally-delayed kids so that was enough of a challenge for them).
Nobody abused Barbie too much, although I did have a group of grade 8 boys during the conference on Friday who kept undressing their Ken doll. The highlight of each lesson was actually going out to the stairwell and having each group’s Barbie do the bungee jump. Only one Barbie had a severe accident (one of the elastics in the cord broke and she fell), a couple got concussions and sued, and the rest had a safe jump. It ended up being one of the more popular sessions at the conference (I actually had kids trying to sneak into it even though they weren’t registered, definitely a compliment) and a couple of little boys told me it was the best thing they’d been to all day, the perfect thing to tell a slightly-burned-out-because-it’s-February teacher.
(Thanks to Peter for getting me to finally post something on here!)
