Day 5: Multiplication Intro

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

Learning Objective: Multiply multi-digit factors to find a product.

Quote of the Day: “Joanne came up with a big idea in 1990, but within six months her mother suddenly passed away. She was living in England at the time, and decided to accept a teaching job in Portugal to try and escape the grief.

Shortly after moving to Portugal she falls in love and gets married. Less than three years after being married her husband abandons her with their three year-old daughter. She moved to Scotland to be closer to her sister. Joanne was living on welfare and had hit rock bottom.

She started writing the story that was birthed back in 1990. Eventually she gets a publishing deal and is given a three thousand dollar writing advance. The publisher didn’t think much of the work and only published a limited number of books. They also asked Joanne to create a pseudonym to write under to disguise her identity as a female writer, and hopefully attract male readers. Joanne doesn’t have a middle name, but her mother’s name was Katherine, so she wrote under the name J.K. Rowling. You are probably familiar with her work. That first book she wrote was Harry Potter. ‘I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized and I still had a daughter that I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life,’ she said.” – Joshua Medcalf

Question of the Day: If we retake a test or quiz, do you average the two grades together or just keep the new grade?

Agenda:

1. My favorite no 98 x 76
2. QSSQ
3. Analyze my favorite no
4. 12 dozen donuts from PBS
5. Multiplication Notes (end of class one)
6. Estimation 180 Days 8-10
7. Finish Notes (if necessary)
8. Begin homework

Assessment: My favorite no question which was 98 x 76. Estimation 180 Days 8-10. Students starting their homework as I circumvented the classroom.

Glass Half-Full Take: I enjoyed the conversation we had about checking the work on a my favorite no problem and a test or quiz question. The students gave me three ways to check the work (redo the problem, do the inverse operation, and estimation). In this case, estimation was very simple because 98 is so close to 100. I told them that on the homework, I do not expect them to check the work. The problems are all drill and kill. If I were a student, I'd work to just be done as fast as possible (more on this in regrets). What I would say though is that the My Favorite No question was not checked enough. Inevitably there are too many students making errors that are just simple calculation mistakes which could be corrected by using one of the three ways that they would check the work. If I'm only giving one problem, my expectations are higher and I told the students this.

Regrets: On the homework, I crossed out many problems for students as I was seeing how proficient they were with multiplication. In year eight of teaching sixth grade, I'm used to seeing a large percentage fly through this assignment. In the future, I'd like to cut down on the number of problems for these students and increase the amount of checking that I see for these students. Checking the work and asking does my answer make sense needs to become engrained in students as a part of problem solving.

Homework: Multiplication Practice B.

Link of the Day: I've never heard of the term parallel tasks. I guess I would branch it under a code name for differentiated instruction. In any case, some good questions asked about whether it matters in a given lesson if a small group shares with the larger group when the tasks of each group have been altered but the standard is the same.