A New Spin On Clock Partners

Here is a completed clock partner sheet. I had them tape this in the back of their INB.

This year I decided to try clock partners as one of my ways to group students. For those of you who have never used these before, you give each student a clock and they have to walk around the room and ask each other to be their "one o'clock partner" or whatever the time slot may be. Then on any given day I can say ok we are going to work with are __ o'clock partner today, and they will sit and work with that person that day. My rule is that they are not allowed to turn anyone down if they have a time slot in common. At the very end it can get tricky because there may be an odd number of students, in that case there will have to be groups of 3. Also depending on how everyone fills out their clocks, there may not be any common times at the end. If this happens, I make groups of 3 asking students who they haven't worked with yet and putting them in that group.

I had my students fill out their clocks on Friday after their first weekly quiz. They had already done clock partners in their science and social studies classes so my hope was that they would be familiar enough with this so that they wouldn't mess up. Because if someone messes up it messes everyone up and they have to start all over, or at least go back to the point of the mess up. I had the clocks all run off for Friday, but then Friday morning I had an epiphany. Instead of simply having 1, 2, 3, etc. on the clocks, I would have the formulas that they need to memorize for the state test in May. That way I can say you are working with your area of a trapezoid partner today. Then the students will have to determine which formula is used to find the area of a trapezoid and then work with that partner. One of my goals this year is to find different ways for my students to remember each of the formulas. They really struggled with this last year. I tried getting them to memorize the formulas with flash cards, but they lost them. I tried getting them to write them out over and over but they wouldn't do that. I also tried to make them understand the formulas conceptually, breaking down the shapes into other shapes (cylinder- 2 circles and a rectangle) but that confused them. So, the standard clock went in my scrap paper tray and I ran copies of the new clocks with the formulas for the times. I am hoping the clock partners with the formulas will help them become more familiar with the formulas. We shall see!


~Q.E.D.