A main part of the new curriculum in BC are the core competencies: communication, thinking, and personal/social. I have been trying to be a little more deliberate to incorporate these into my planning. Here is one activity that I tried the day before Spring Break, and considering the timing it went really well!
Materials:
Each group needs:
- Large paper
- String
- Pencil
- Compass or geotool
- Meter stick
- Instruction sheet
Instructions: I took some of the bonus questions from a different resource that I can’t seem to find again. If anyone knows the source please let me know and I will update to include the link.
Document: Drawing Circles Challenge
Front – On one side of your groups paper you need to draw the following circles:
A. Circle with a diameter of 80 cm.
B. Circle with a radius of 10 cm.
C. Circle with a diameter of 5 cm.
D. Circle with a radius of 0.5 cm.
Back – Try as many of these challenges as you can:
A. How big does a circle need to be to fit two smaller circles with 4 cm diameter inside? Draw it!
B. Draw a quadrilateral (rectangle, square, parallelogram) and see if you can draw a circle inside that touches all four sides of the quadrilateral.
C. Using only circles, can you create a familiar shape (star, heart, etc.)?
How it worked for us:
Hard at work
For my class I gave very minimal instructions for this assignment. We reviewed briefly how to use the geotool to draw circles (slightly more complicated then a compass for some) and then I gave them the materials and sent them on there way. I really wanted this to be a collaborative problem solving activity and it became just that! It was very interesting to see how students worked together and came up with solutions.
Drawing the large circle with the string took longer than I expected but I absolutely LOVED the conversations about radius and diameter that came from the activity. Communication and creative thinking came out in full force for this activity! I also loved that the creative part of it allowed for different students to take leadership roles than normally occurs with math group work.
We used almost a full double block to complete this (two 43 minutes periods) but keep in mind that it was the Friday before Spring Break so focus was not the easiest… If I were to do it again I would definitely keep it in a double block and I would follow up with some meaningful reflection/discussion.
How do you bring the core competencies into the math classroom?
If you use this activity, I would LOVE to hear how it goes!
Tale of Two Teachers 
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