MP3 Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
MP6 Attend to precision.
MP8 Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.
3.NBT.2 (Yes! Third Grade Standards!) Fluently add and subtract within 1000 using strategies and algorithms based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction.
The Learning Objective: Subtract multi-digit numbers
Quote of the Day: I did not give a quote today. This as an idea is new for me this year. I have used it as a basketball coach and believe it can help set the tone for the mentality of the students day to day to over come adversity and stay humble through success. That being said, since it is new to me I have to start planning better and find a spot on my board for it. I'm thinking that it will go next to homework since that aspect of learning is almost entirely predicated on attitude.
Agenda:
Class #1:
- Jumpstart from Yummy Math on home field advantage in the NFL
- As students are worked on the jumpstart, I collected their homework which was the letters in the person of their fifth grade teachers and their signed syllabus. The percentage of homework that was turned in was over 90%.
- My Favorite No. If you haven't seen the magic of My Favorite No as an assessment watch this video
- Operations vocabulary notes: Sum and difference
Class #2:
- Homework formatting. All of the teachers in the sixth grade frequently have students use their notebooks to do homework assignments that involve worksheets. The reasons are obvious - the students will need more space to do work and can keep a kind of running diary of what they have learned. We also discussed numbering each problem. It perplexes me that this is even an issue, but it is.
- Approaching word problems. Myself and the other three math teachers have agreed that there are three essentials that students should get used to in regards to word problems: the students must circle what they know, underline what they're trying to find out, and restate the prompt (students call it turning the question around).
- Students could then start the rest of the homework (18 problems) and in many cases finish the homework assignment.
- I gave students the first 4 rows of Pascal's Triangle and had them try to find the numbers in the next 4 rows (Math Practice 8).
- One student was able to complete this so I gave her a copy of the first two Visual Patterns as another challenge
- The students did a ticket to leave that asked them to solve 5092 - 1375
The Assessment: The My Favorite No question was shown below
Homework: Whole Numbers Review A, students should have supplies bought and in class by Tuesday, and the students that did not turn in their syllabus signed need that by Tuesday.
My Glass Half-Full Take: Last June when a colleague and I learned that we would need revamp our curriculum map since we were changing the structure of our math classes we initially thought we would leave out the whole number review unit. This unit is nowhere to be found in the sixth grade standards, and if an education consultant were to see our map the first thing that would be scrutinized would probably be the fact that we teach standards that in some cases go as low as the third grade. I am well aware that much of the blame for the U.S. dragging behind Finland, Singapore, and other nations in mathematics education today is a result of lowering the bar for our students, but before this hypothetical consultant jumps down my throat let me explain why today will be a valuable day for me as an educator this year and more importantly my students.
First of all, it was the third day of school. For intimidated sixth graders in a new building. Using a locker for the first time. With a lock. That won't open. An entirely different schedule. That includes eight different teachers compared to one. In seven different rooms (no - not eight rooms). And mingling with new peers. From four different elementary schools. Not to mention the five new students from five different districts. There's a time and place for high standards, but even folks joining the army fill out forms before being sent to boot camp.
Second of all, these students were assessed and the results indicated that not everyone had mastered this standard. In fact, in one of my three classes, nine out of twenty students did not give the correct answer of 1,088. Call it rust, call it nerves, or whatever you like - I'm pretty sure that if 45% of students were not ready to demonstrate a third grade standard out of the chute, they may have had even higher anxiety about the new school year than they already did if we started with sixth grade standards. Subtraction is an issue of math fluency. If the gaps students have with borrowing or checking their work are not at least addressed before tackling the sixth grade curriculum, it would be the equivalent of asking a scuba diver to navigate The Great Barrier Reef without an oxygen tank.
Third, I did challenge the students after they had gone through the homework. The majority of students had more than 10 minutes to derive rows five through eight of Pascal's Triangle, and only one student could do it. I had to continuously point at my poster of Albert Einstein and his quote, "It's not that I'm so smart - it's that I stay with problems longer." These students were able to get some but not all of the numbers in Pascal's Triangle. They shared with me different ideas of what the pattern could and could not be. They argued with the person next to them about why every number in the fifth row would be one and four. Most students ended up exhausting half of the list of Mathematics Practice Standards. So for the majority of students who have mastered the third grade standard, this class was still a learning experience.
Fourth, with the two classes I saw twice, I did a post-assessment. All I did was change the numbers from the pre-assessment. These two classes went from 62% answering the problem correctly to 79% answering correctly. And for the 21% that still do not have mastery, I will continue to work with them on this issue because everyone should swim with the fishes in the Great Barrier Reef.
Fifth, look at the wrong answers. Who's to say this habit is easy to break? This is the perfect time to explain to students the value of checking the work (see the right answer). Even confident students can agree to making simple mistakes and this leads to a nice conversation about analyzing what can go wrong in any given problem and how to filter out these mistakes.
I am glad that we are going to give the students review for an opening unit. When the bell rang at the end of the day I felt as though most students had come away better thinkers than they were entering the day. This unit serves as the foundation for how the students will see different tasks based on their own personal potential and will be asked to analyze these tasks on different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.
Where I'd Throw the Red (Challenge) Flag: I did not give a post-assessment to the class that I share with another teacher. It was unfortunate because this can be an excellent indicator not only of who still needs help on subtraction, but also about what learning styles work and do not work for certain students. The problem was that I did not think about doing this ticket to leave until the middle of the day, and obviously never had the opportunity to relay the message. This is not atypical for me and I imagine most teachers to come up with and implement a new idea on the fly.
Valuable Website Visit of the Day: Estimation 180 - Monday will mark the first of several visits to the land of making sense of guessing.
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