Comments on: Complete the Quadrilateral Domino Activity

By: trish

trish — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 02:35:29 +0000

I like this a lot and want to steal it- I think to avoid the problems with guessing and fitting, I may just give each kid a few cards and tell him that someone else has his answer. if they complete their cards and check they can get a domino train. I may print 2 or 3 sets on different colors- to keep the chains working. Maybe this will allow for individual work, but also the self check

By: Michael Fenton

Michael Fenton — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 07:37:32 +0000

Fawn, thanks for the feedback. A few quick replies:

1. Great feedback! I’ve been trying to pay more attention to this over the past few months. For example, when we play a Set Game daily puzzle as a whole class, I now break our play into three stages: Search alone, search with your group, share aloud (until we have them all). I’m still trying to remember to incorporate some individual thinking time into more lessons/activities, and it slipped by me on this one.

2. The entire motivation for the “matching game-ness” was the self-checking quality of the domino format. I hadn’t thought about how that would allow students to guess in some spots, though now that I’m thinking about it I realize that in many cases they can find area or perimeter and guess on the other, especially in my revamped versions (with 10-domino Set A and Set B). One way to avoid that would be to focus on area only in Set A and perimeter only in Set B, but not it seems like I’m trying too hard to stick with the dominos, and maybe I should just go back to the handout you (or Don) made.

3. 🙂

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

By: Fawn Nguyen

Fawn Nguyen — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 07:25:02 +0000

Hi Michael. Wow, this was a lot of work! I love the addition of perimeter instead of just area.

I’m not sure, however, why it’s a matching game aside from making it a matching game. My concerns are 1) If I’m reading your instructions correctly, there’s no time for individual work. This is always my first step in any task because I personally can’t think when I’m immediately put into a group. I need that quiet think time. I feel I have no ownership of the problem as I might not get to share, others are likely to think faster than I can and give the answer before I have a chance to, 2) I like the “self-checking” aspect of the domino idea, but here it also seems to allow room for guessing, “Oh, this piece must go here because it doesn’t fit anywhere else,” 3) My FAVORITE part of this activity is seeing HOW kids solve for the area — how they splice and dice up each quadrilateral was great to see — turns out many of them did this differently than I did.

What do you think?