For the first time this year, I employed my idea of an Overview Day. We are about to begin our first unit on Derivatives, so I wrote the words “Derivative” and “Differentiation” on the board with a circle around it. It was their job to research these terms, and add any important words, phrases, formulas, or pictures to the board. When they finished, we had a very nice summary of the entire chapter that THEY created! I went through and explained how each part was relevant to derivatives, and how they would be used. This way, when they see these words, phrases, etc., again, it will reinforce today’s discussion. Here are the results of their research:

A lot of good and accurate work is shown here, even if the students don’t quite understand the meaning of it all. I really like one student’s cross-curricular humor in including a “cellular differentiation” diagram as well as the “derivatives” of Proto-Indo-European languages. And in case you’re wondering, yes, “snap, crackle and pop” are actually terms, albeit facetious ones, used by physicists in their discussions of derivatives.

This is another group’s results. Lots of good research on this one as well. The discussion with this group was more interactive, which you can’t really see, but it’s worth mentioning. I really like the creature that looks like an earless horse.

This class is my smallest class, which explains why there are fewer contributions. They still get the main idea though, and one student even added a joke, which I’ve seen before, but now it makes sense to him.

All in all, I would count today a success, and I will definitely be doing this again. Getting students to seek answers themselves instead of waiting for a lecture should be a life skill that we teach them anyway. I can’t wait to see how this impacts the level of understanding as we progress through the chapter!