Day 27: Adding & Subtracting Decimals Continued

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.NS.3 Fluently add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit decimals using the standard algorithm for each operation.

Objective: Add and subtract decimal numbers to find a sum or difference

Agenda:

1. Open Middle - Adding Decimals to Get to 1
2. QSSQ 
3. NBA Yummy Math or Adding & Subtracting Decimal Practice from a worksheet
4. Weekly Quiz

Assessment: I circumvented the room throughout both #1 and #3 on the agenda.

Glass Half-Full: There was a good deal of retention after the students had three days off from class which was encouraging. The Open Middle problem was very effective for getting students to be engaged and persistent, but I did have to carefully model and explain the directions to the students. I have not used Open Middle much in past years, so I think this might just be a learning curve similar to what students experience with Visual Patterns every year. Nonetheless, once they got going it was great to see their work - even in the cases where students were not able to achieve the best potential answer. I even had a student get exactly one on a sum, but as another student correctly pointed out the digit nine was used twice.

Regrets: It was interesting to see how different classes handled the Open Middle problems. I did a think, pair, share in all of my classes. In one of those classes we came up with several correct answers and in the other two we came up with none. The variety of depth to which the students in each class understood the problem was fairly significant and not something I accounted for in planning. I'm not sure what I could have done differently other than to have something ready such as come up with a second way to get to 0.999.