Models of Excellence

Water and Math: Distance, the Pythagorean Theorem, and Scale

Grade(s):

8

The eighth grade teaching team at ASCEND planned an interdisciplinary expedition around water. In science, students conducted water testing, in humanities they created podcasts from interviews of people’s memories associated with water, and did watercolors in art.

Ikezasso(Ikebana with weeds)

Grade(s):

7

Country: Japan

Senate Expedition

Grade(s):

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Writing with evidence is an important skill for students to learn, but how often do they use mathematics as evidence?

Low Poly/ Geometric Portraits

Grade(s):

6, 7

Before creating these geometric portraits using Photoshop, students were required to research a person from the African Diaspora who they wanted to use as the subject for their portrait.

Spiral of Theodorus

Grade(s):

8

This project was an integration between the math and art enrichment teachers that helped students cement the concept of Pythagorean Theorem and developed their protractor and ruler skills to a high level of precision.

Black History Geometric Portraits

Grade(s):

7

Knowing the past opens doors to our future. Students created geometric portraits based on a hero of African descent. After researching their hero, students picked a quote from their hero and used that as a base to create a silhouette for their geometric and monochrome portrait.

Whale of a Project

Grade(s):

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Elementary students (1st-6th) in a Significant Support Needs (SSN) special education class engaged in an expedition centered around the Sanctuary Ocean Count Project in Hawaii to learn about whales, culminating in a multi-disciplinary project with the SSN teacher, Speech Language Pathologist (SLP

Scaling the Solar System into Downtown Asheville

Grade(s):

6

It is hard to grasp just how expansive our Solar System really is. As a way to make this abstract concept more realistic, sixth-grade students at Evergreen Community Charter School scaled the planets into downtown Asheville, North Carolina.

Redrawing the World

Grade(s):

7

This project was part of an interdisciplinary expedition entitled Global Citizenship. As part of this study in math, students were asked to create a scale drawing using a statistic other than land mass or population in order to visualize how countries in the world supported the statistic.