"Holy Fathom, Batman!"

This week I learned about and how to use Fathom and Geometry Sketch Pad.  Prior to this class, I hadn’t heard of either.  I had also learned about hooking a motion detector and a thermometer up to a graphing calculator.  The last time I used a graphing calculator was back in high school and we never got to do anything as fun as that! 

I would love to use both Fathom and Geometry Sketch Pad in my future classrooms.  I know my third graders would love to play around with the shapes, making the smiley face or other designs.  It would be a great way to get them to stretch their thinking about figures.  I also think Fathom would be useful in my class too.  Just last week we covered range and mode using a line plot.  It would be great for my students to select the data – something that would be meaningful to them.  One of the Washington State standards is to make and interpret graphs.  This would be a great way for them to apply this by interpreting their Fathom graphs. 

The physics FOSS kit for third grade is on sound.  Is there a device that I could hook up to a graphing calculator that would calculate sound (waves) and put it into a graph?  Or is there something to hook up to a computer that does something similar?  That would be a great way to have an interdisciplinary lesson – math and science.  I think the kids would enjoy that.