Splat!

I recently had the privilege to work with our seventh grade math classes.  They were beginning a unit on equations.  I had read about Steve Wyborney's Splats on his blog and suggested to the seventh grade math teachers that we try using them at the beginning of the unit.

What are Splats?  They are PowerPoint presentations of chips and "Splats" that give a visual representation to help promote number sense.  Given that we are a Chromebook district, we uploaded the PowerPoint presentations to Google Drive viewed them with the Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer extension.  Here are some examples of what the slides look like:

     

Splats can be used with any grade level and with many different math concepts.  They worked really well with the equations unit as the Splats provided a visualization of the variable(s).  The students caught on to Splats very quickly which allowed us to ask higher level questions to invoke deeper thinking.   The teachers commented that students who usually did not contribute to class discussions had their hands up during the Splats lesson.

The math teachers felt that the students had a better understanding of equations as compared to previous years, which they attributed to starting out with the Splats.  I was invited back later in the unit to observe a lesson in which Splats were once again used to solidify the concepts of equations.  When reflecting on the unit, we decided that next year we would give students equations and have them build the corresponding Splat images using Google Slides.

I am grateful to Steve Wyborney for making his Splat slides available for free downloads.  What a difference it made to our seventh graders!