"Tracking" Students' Progress

This week one of the highlights of my time was doing a special project with my Geometry class.  Right now we are learning about area for different shapes, but focusing mainly on circles. This activity goal was to find the area of the track. I used the announcement that the school board had approved a project where the track would be resurfaced. So we were going to see if we could come up with a close number to the company that is resurfacing it.

I split them into groups. Each had a different objective, in hopes that they wouldn't just copy each other's sheets. Find the area of lanes 1-4. Find the area of lanes 5-8. Find the area of the space inside the track. Find the area of all other parts of the black top.

With a sunny, 65 degree day to help us along, we walked out with tape measures (or yard sticks) in hand. They needed to take measurements and then come to a conclusion on what they needed to do with those measurements. Then we were going to see if we added all their areas together (tracks parts) we could get close to what the professional company came up with to resurface the track.

Besides having this be a good learning tool, this also helped with the morale of the classes. It was such a nice day outside and we were inside (with no windows). I think that they had fun doing it and I had fun hearing all the different ways they were going to measure long distances.

I think I will be doing this again in the future. Just to let you know, all three classes came close to the actual professional number. And one class even was within 10 yards!