Last week, Kitten and I reached her textbook’s chapter on graphing linear equations, and a minor mistake with negative numbers threw her into an “I can’t do it!” funk. It’s not easy teaching a perfectionist kid.
Usually her mood improves if we switch to a slightly more advanced topic, and luckily I had saved these worksheets on my desktop, waiting for just such an opportunity. Today’s lesson:
- Some fun(ish) worksheets
“For tomorrow, students will be graphing systems of inequalities, so I decided to create a little Ohio Jones adventure (Indiana’s lesser known brother)…”
I offered to give her a hint, but she wanted to try it totally on her own. It took her about 40 minutes to work through the first few rooms of the Lost Templo de los Dulces and explain her solutions to me. I’m sure she’ll speed up with experience.
So far, she’s enjoying it much more than the textbook lesson. It’s fascinating to me how the mere hint of fantasy adventure can change graphing equations from boring to cool. Thanks, Dan!
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 
Ahh, but that mere hint has echoes from the past, when she knew Ohio’s (long lost?) cousin Fibonacci so well. Too cool! (http://letsplaymath.net/best-of-the-blog/alexandria-jones/)
Actually, Kitten was a newborn back when I was writing the Alex stories. Maybe I should start polishing them up as an ebook and assign her the job of editing, so she’ll have an excuse to read through them. 🙂
She has heard them, hasn’t she? (When I looked at the list, to get the link, I was excited to see that there were more than I’d had access to when I first discovered them.) It would be a lovely book. Please do it!
I think she’s read a few of them, because she at least sometimes follows my blog. Since it’s January again (and I was trying to keep the seasonal parts lined up), maybe I should start anew on transcribing the old Microsoft Publisher files…
Transcribing? I’m not sure what you mean, but it sounds like more work than it should be…
It should be simple copy-and-paste, but it doesn’t work out that way, partly because the old files used fonts that my current computer doesn’t know how to translate. And formatting is different for the web than it was for the old newsletter, and I like to look for images and add extra tidbits and stuff. So I end up doing quite a bit from scratch for each article.
That’s also why I’ve never yet got around to updating the old history notes on each issue. Those were each just a few sentences in the margins, but a blog post demands a bit more substance.