Fourth Grade AIM
Today in AIM
After paying our fixed/variable expenses and balancing our checkbooks we launched our golf course PBL by generating a list of all the things we need to know about mini golf before we start designing and building. We went over some math concepts; parallel lines, perpendicular lines, vertex, right, acute, obtuse angles, and introduced a few new ones including complementary and supplementary angles, translation, reflection and rotation. Students worked in partners to conduct a few experiments on how a ball responds to the various angles. We agreed that acute angles could cause problems in our golf design, however next week we will experiment with different degrees of acute angles to see if some will work better than others.
With our remaining time we put the finishing touches on our Leadership cardboard automatia and reviewed the different styles of leadership from last week and introduced the third style: political frame. Leaders who use the political frame effectively use several methods including: clarifying what they want and what they can get; assess the distribution of power and interests; build linkages to key stakeholders; and persuade first, negotiate second, and coerce only if necessary. To practice building consensus the class worked together to select the color for new t-shirts for the class (just a simulation). Each student was given a slip of paper with their personal instructions (for example – You like to take and share your opinion during the decision-making process. You like most colors, but you hate the color red). They had 15 minutes to try and come to consensus! They did a great job of trying to reach consensus and got super close - we were able to reflect and take notice of the strategies that worked and didn’t work.
Oh one last thing... with our final 40 minutes we started to explore the idea of integers - which folds nicely into scoring in golf!