Rate Exploration Activity

It was the first day back after the holiday break and I wanted to plan something active for my students to do. We were in the middle of the chapter on rates and so I was looking for an activity where student timed themselves doing different activities and then converted these rates to different time periods. I found this activity on NCTM Illuminations:  What's Your Rate?
Other than that, I wasn't able to find much online. I decided to take the worksheet from NCTM Illuminations and add a few more activities and add some more challenging conversion questions.
Here is what I came up with:

Available here:

As I worked on the tasks and questions for this activity, I realized that this would be an excellent anchor tasks to introduce the concept of rates. In the past I have used a YouTube video called the The World's Fastest Everything - 2013. The students really enjoy the video, but I think they will get more out of this activity. Students have an intuitive sense of rates and I think it is important to tap into their prior knowledge about rates by exploring activities they have experience with. I love how this activity makes it clear that two things are being measured simultaneously and that those two things together create a rate. I really enjoyed reading this blog posts about rates (What I think a rate is now  from f(t).

Look What I Found at Dollar Tree!

I found these 3-D Geometric Shapes at Dollar Tree yesterday! I plan to use them during the first week of school to have students create a growth mindset classroom display!  I will give each student a face to color and write a growth message on!

Dodecahedron:  12 faces (pentagons)
Icosahedron:  20 faces (triangles)
Rhombicuboctahedron has:  26 faces (8 triangles and 18 squares)
Small Stellated Dodecahedron:  60 faces (triangles)