Friday, June 18, 2010

Visually Conceptualizing the Oil Disaster

Getting students to conceptualize how big, small, or far away something is can be difficult. A fellow colleague of mine, who teaches math, faces this difficulty all of the time with her students while teaching number sense. A method she uses at the beginning of the unit consists of her drawing a number line on the board. On the left hand side she writes the number 0 and on the right hand side she writes the number 1,000,000,000. She then asks each student to come up to the board and place a mark on the number line where they think the number 1,000 would be. 9 out of 10 times, the students place their marks in the middle of the number line, which is incorrect.

When teaching students about the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, it may be difficult to get students to understand the severity of the disaster. If it was my Home.com is a great resource to use to help students understand how much of the Gulf of Mexico is being affected by the oil disaster. This site is great because it also allows a person to move the oil spill to cover the area in which they live. All a person has to do is type in their zip code and the enormous blob of oil will move to that location. Thank you Andy Lintner for the wonderful resource!

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