Franklin Project Progress

Team Pursuit's The Mouse and the Motorcycle Book Club started our session by reading Chapter 4, "Keith". We are continuing to follow Ralph, the mouse on his adventure.

Last week we began creating drafts of classroom maps. We talked about perspective, proportion, and bird's eye view. This week students re-evaluated the maps they started and most opted to began again with a clearer sense of map-making in their mind. We'll work towards creating final drafts next week and students will test their maps by hiding an object, pointing to the location on their map, and seeing if their peers can find the object easily. We discussed how adding additional objects or leaving major objects out of the layout can impact the effectiveness of the map.

Once we've completed classroom maps we'll go on to developing our Franklin school map. This will eventually be available to visitors in our main office.

Travel Agents and Hotel Designers

In Team Odyssey students that are acting as Travel Agents to create an ideal vacation for their clients have moved on to the next step. They have calculated flight cost based on real world fares, hotel budget based on current rates, and have done all of this using the information from their client interviews (travel location, how many people traveling, time to leave/return, hotel style preference). In our past two sessions we have moved on to calculating food costs. Students were asked to find a different restaurant (in the vacation locale) for each meal. They then need to select 4-5 menu items and find the average cost of an item for each restaurant (based on their selection of items).

Last week students were introduced to different types of averages that can be used to represent a number set. We discussed the meaning of mean, median, and mode. We decided as a group to find the mean, median and mode average shoe size for 5 students in the class. Students learned how to calculate each. Students have come up with different number sets to practice finding these averages such as number of pets in a family and number of letters in your name. They have been taking notes and the whole group had been engaged and participating regularly. They seem to be really grasping this concept.

Finding the mean average is our main focus and students have really been able to apply their division strategies to these tasks. We've also discussed how to interpret remainders as fractions in order to be able to round to find a whole number average.

In Team Odyssey a small group of students have been working on a Hotel Design PBL unit. This group completed The Travel Agent PBL Unit last year. They are designing a hotel in order to apply skills such as multiplication and division to real world situations. They have decided on hotel structure and design, determined floor and total square footage, and will move on to calculate furniture cost, pool design and volume, and create an official blue print.

This group wowed me this week. I came in today expecting to set up how they would determine hotel floor/total square footage. They had already calculated everything by looking up what the typical square footage of a hotel room is then applying that to their specs. Wow! Talk about self-directed learning, this was so inspiring to see. They knew the information they needed, determined how to set up the problem, and solved. Accurately too :)

Way to go Team Odyssey!