Hello and Happy Sunday!
Thanks to ALL of you so much for your support of my fraction unit! I was so happy to see so many of you were able to get it yesterday. . . and the kind comments you left just made my day. Thanks so much . . . hopefully lots of students will be having fun learning fractions in a really meaningful way!
I didn’t really blog much about my little mini unit on angles and protractors . . . I do have something kind of fun to share with that, but I do want to start digging into division. Now, if you have taught intermediate level students before, you know that this topic can take even the best math student down! Over the next few weeks I’ll try to share some of the lessons I try as I work to really help my students understand the concept of division and sharing as well as what to do with those pesky remainders!
So, to start, I asked my students to spend a few minutes journaling about what they understand about division. We did a little sharing, and I found out that the kids knew a little–but didn’t really have much to say!
Immediately those early finishers started pairing up to tackle this one–I was happy to see that they instantly knew that this was not going to work out quite as nicely!
As I noticed that most of the class was finishing, I called everyone to the front and told them that we were going to play a guessing game. I was going to flash a learning poster on the Smartboard, and they were going to guess WHY I selected it. I explained that I hadn’t even really looked at answers although I was pretty confident that they were correct–I wanted them to think about it through the lens of the math practices.
Here was the first one:
Here are some of the others I selected. See if you can tell why I picked them!
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This student showed several different ways to solve the problem…I thought that was pretty cool! |
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This student used arrows that lined up with her explanation to really make sure we could tell what she was doing. |
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This student started out by solving the problem quite quickly . . . but then had second thoughts and documented “NEW” thinking — see below. |
I don’t know which was more exciting to me–the fact that he thought outside of the box or the fact that he RECOGNIZED that his ideas had changed and he noted that on his learning poster. Math can be so much fun! Thanks again for all your support over the months, everyone. Have a wonderful Sunday!