After reviewing the Puma Site examples, I found the Dream Job activity to be the most appealing. Although the activity is designed for high school students, the lesson could be tweaked to accommodate my 6th & 7th graders. I am confident my students would enjoy this activity because it involves money, which would pique their interest. Additionally, I also think they would enjoy signing their first work-related contract.
I like that the activity addresses many components of number sense. For example, it requires students to add, multiply, estimate, understand place value and the magnitude of numbers, as well as organize data. If I were to tweak the lesson, I would delete the values that are within the weekly templates, and require students to calculate them on their own. Although my students wouldn’t entertain the questions pertaining to geometric progression, they could definitely answer #1-#4 on the questionnaire. Since this activity is time-consuming, I would encourage students to work on it whenever they finished their classwork early; it would also be a great component for a vacation packet. Another alternative would be to assign different groups of students to calculate particular weeks. For example, I have six groups of four in my classroom; thus, Group 1 could calculate Weeks 1-5; Group 2: Weeks 6-10, Group 3: Weeks 11-15 etc. There are a number of modifications that could be made to make the lesson less tedious and more appealing to grades 6-8. I will probably include it in my vacation packet for winter recess.
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