Collaborative Math Project

I have been working on a collaborative math project with Lisa and Michelle. For our project, we decided to use the book My Monster Mama Loves Me So by Laura Leuck to teach doubles. In the book, the Monster Mama and the Monster Child share similar features. As we read the book, we created doubles equations to add the characteristics that the Monster Mama and Monster Child share.

After reading the book, each student created a drawing of their own “Monster Mama” and their “Monster Me.” After each student completed his/her drawing, I had the students take a picture of the illustration. It was great to see the students helping each other as they used the digital camera.

Once the students took pictures of their illustrations, we recorded their voice overviews on Audacity. I had originally planned to add the students’ voices into a VoiceThread but had previously experienced problems embedding the VoiceThread into Class Blogmeister. Instead of VoiceThread, I decided to create Podcasts of the students’ voices and add each voice overview individually as a podcast. In trying to complete this project, I discovered www.podbean.com. Through this site I was able to upload the files I had saved as mp3s and get a URL to post in our class blog.

Lisa, Michelle, and I have all added the finished illustrations and voice descriptions to our blogs. The next step is for each class to visit each blog to create more doubles equations about the “Monster Mama” and “Monster Me” illustrations.

Through this lesson I have learned many new things. I have learned how much more interactive a lesson can become with the use of technology. I have done this lesson before and this time the students really seemed to understand and define what a double is. I also found that I was able to incorporate writing because I had the students write down what they would like to say before recording on Audacity.

Overall this lesson went really well. I appreciated the opportunity to work with Michelle and Lisa on this lesson. They were both very supportive when it came to problem solving and sharing ideas about the lesson. I look forward to collaborating again in the future.

You can visit our classroom blogs to check out our "Monster Mama" and "Monster Me" project at http://www.classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=285494


This lesson can be found in The Marilyn Burns Classroom Math Library book.