Every lesson this year started students out with an experience. After the experience, we helped students formalize their learning by layering mathematical vocabulary, notation, or formulas on top of the experience. One of the benefits of this instructional approach is that we always have a landmark activity to refer back to, something that will trigger students' retrieval of past content. Instead of saying "remember what we did in the lesson over Topic 2.1?" we can say "remember what we learned from Felix Baumgartner and the speed of his free fall?"
Get The Classroom Ready
Before students arrive for class, set up 6 - 12 stations around the room. Each station will have a reminder of a different activity that took place during the school year. Posting the front page of the EFFL lesson is generally sufficient. If you have other artifacts from the lesson, feel free to add them!
Print the recording sheet for students to fill out at each station.
Which Activities Could Be Included?
Soul Mates at Starbucks (Continuity and Discontinuity)
Are You a 5-Star Uber Driver? (Intermediate Value Theorem)
Can a Human Break the Sound Barrier? (Instantaneous Rate of Change)
The Making of a Slopes Graph (Defining the Derivative)
How is Lindt Chocolate Made? (The Chain Rule)
The Lovely Ladybug (Connecting Position, Velocity, and Acceleration)
How Many Shoppers on Black Friday? (Rates of Change in Applied Contexts)
Birthday Balloons (Intro to Related Rates)
Can Calculus Get You Fined? (The Mean Value Theorem)
Playing the Stock Market (Determining Function Behavior from the First Derivative)
How Fast Does the Flu Spread? (Function Behavior with the Second Derivative)
Fast and Curious (Approximating Areas with Riemann Sums)
Under Cover (The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and Accumulation)
Go Figure (The FTC and Definite Integrals)
How Many Sea Lions are on Elliott Bay? (Finding Particular Solutions)
How Fast is the Coronavirus Spreading? (Exponential Models with Differential Equations)
Finding the Perfect Rectangle (Average Value of a Function)
Whitney’s Bike Ride (Connecting Position, Velocity, and Acceleration using Integrals)
How Many People Are at the Met? (Using Definite Integrals in Applied Contexts)
How Rich are the Top 1%? (Finding Areas between Curves Expressed as Functions of x)
What is the Volume of a Pear? (Volume using the Disc Method)
Facilitating a Gallery Walk
Put students into groups of 3 - 5.
Send each group to a different starting station.
Set timer (suggestion 4 minutes).
Students have a discussion about the activity at their station. When time is up, they move to the next station. They move until they have visited all the stations.
At the last station, allow each group to share out about that activity.
Sample Student Response
At the end of the gallery walk, we ask students to share out. Here is an exemplary response:
“In Under Cover, we looked at the rate that umbrellas were being produced, which was the graph of an upside-down parabola. We then calculated different integrals to figure out how many umbrellas had been produced by a given time. We realized we could find how many umbrellas had been produced at any time by making the independent variable the upper limit of integration, so when you plug in a time, you calculate the area under the curve up until that time. This function was called an accumulation function and when we found its rate of change, we got right back to the original rate of change function that we had the graph of.”
Ready to help your students re-live their aha moments from this year? Download the activity below!