I guess you could say I LIKE Terms. 

Welcome to a blog post about my favourite subject, math. When I was young, I was fascinated when I was being taught Math and I just loved how everything connects, to me math just makes sense. When we came across Like Terms, to say the least I was excited. 

We started off with building our knowledge on the topic by doing worksheets for practice.  

Once we had the basics down, we were introduced to our project. This project was pretty free standing, we had control over our driving question, group, and what we were going to make. The only condition, it had to be involved with polynomials and like terms. 

Our competencies involved were:

Understanding and solving: Apply multiple strategies to solve problems in both abstract and contextualized situations 

Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms

Connecting and Reflecting: Connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interests

Driving Question: How can we make an equation, using like terms & polynomials out of ingredients of a fruit smoothie?

 

Choosing our own project basically, gave me a chance to show that I can work with my friends and still stay focused on the task at hand. In this rubric you can see what I was being assessed on and how well I did on each.

But how did I get to where I am right now? Well that took a lot of practice in each area, and my project end mind map is our first stop. 

This mind map I made adds to my understanding of the big idea and shows some of the questions I had at the beginning of the project and how I answered them at the end. Starting with our understanding and solving competency, I feel like I accomplished this one. Evidence of that is our project itself. Our group chose to make a smoothie and put its ingredients into an equation involving like terms. This may not be the most clever solution, but it definitely was an abstract situation, and I feel like I made the most of it by applying strategies like weighing each ingredient and putting those numbers in an equation.               

As for the presentation itself, I think we did pretty good. I’m a very social person, and I love talking to people so public speaking has never been that much of a problem for me. I think we spoke clearly and effectively in our presentation, and if I were sitting in the audience I feel I would’ve understood the big idea a bit better. There were some areas that needed clarification on, and that we could’ve explained better to our audience. Some parts of our equation could have been better, for example we didn’t add exponents to our equation which we could’ve done if we were fully invested in this project. Although in the presentation we did use correct terms, like coefficient, like terms, and variable. 

Personalized work was pretty important as well, seeing that you can’t copy anyone’s ideas, or steal anyone’s project to make it your own. I believe that my work and my contribution to this project was personalized, and authentic. I created all the keynotes slides and for each I put in authentic work. I’m also being assessed on my blog post for this competency. All my work and posts on my blog is always 100% original, I write about my original experiences and my own reflections. This post is no different, I’m putting an honest reflection and I think reflecting honestly is what helps me improve in the future. 

Thanks to my group, Emily and Liam, for helping me through this project and for Mr. Gross for teaching us all we need to know about Like Terms and Polynomials! 

~Malaika