My Ah-ha: I should have been doing this since August!!
Since the very beginning of the year, I have kept a routine with my class where I hope to infuse a bit of critical thinking. We have Estimation Monday, Number Talk Tuesday, Wonder Wednesday, Thinking Thursday and Flashback Friday. With today being Tuesday, I wanted to spice things up a bit, so I turned Number Talk in to Pattern Talk.
Using Pattern #31 from the Visual Patterns blog by Fawn Nguyen and the patterns handouts found on the teacher's page, I created this Google Document for my students. I linked the Google Doc to our Moodle (a free MOOC that my county uses) page. Once they open the document, the create their own copy, share it with me and complete it. These types of assignments are so super easy for me, because I never have to worry about a student losing their copy, they never have to worry about saving it since it's on Google, and I can grade it and provide feedback through the comments instantaneously.
Woah. Side track about Google Docs, sorry!
My class has been looking at various patterns, and creating function tables, equations and rules using Desmos (another digital resource I could get side tracked with), so I used today's Number Talk/Pattern Talk to re-enforce what's been going on in our lessons. I gave absolutely no guidance to the students. Just let them do the thinking and see what they could come up with. And, I don't want to brag... but I have some pretty fantastic students. Most of them were able to complete this task in the 15 minutes I gave them (which included needing to turn on our dying, slow, computers), and all but one picked up the pattern and ran with it.
I could brag about all of my students... but, I chose just two samples of the work created. Take a look at these: Student A (who inserted a screenshot of the desmos), Student B (who linked desmos).
I am thinking I am ready to throw at pattern like #60 at them...
