Collective Memory

I found a new classroom activity that sounded interesting and I was fed up with battling my year 7´s to settle in after lunch time...especially since half of the football team is in the class.  I was happy to see Mr. Barton of www.mrbartonmaths.com tweeting about an activity that would have my students working in groups and up and about the classroom. 

Mr Barton says:
"Collective Memory activities are designed to encourage positive collaborative learning and give students a deeper understanding of a given topic. They also help stimulate a fun, interactive learning environment."

Sounds good right?  So I tried it.  I split the class into groups of four and differentiated according to ability.  I gave each table a piece of paper and some markers and allowed them to decide the order in which they would come up to my computer. 

One student from each group came up to my computer at the same time.  The rest of the class cannot see what is on my screen but those students get 15 seconds to look at the picture on the screen and then one minute with their group to try and explain what they saw.  Their task being to reproduce the poster and answer the missing questions as accurately as they possibly can.  The procedure is repeated until each member of the group has come up 3 times.

At the end of the activity I gathered each of the posters and we voted as a class on who we thought was most accurate.  Then we checked the calculations to see if the groups also understood how to answer the question. 

It was fun, they loved it, are now asking me to do it every lesson.  Prep was easy and I thoroughly enjoyed watching their enthusiasm!  Another "fun" maths class! 

There are loads of resources on TES for collective memory.  And here is the link where I first found out about the activity:

http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/collectivememory.htm

This is the poster I showed my students:

 

 

One student working hard to reproduce it:

 A little bit of progress after a few rounds: