One lesson I learned in my first teaching life was to expect a mix of "good" days and "bad" days. At least that was the way it seemed to me at the time. In my student teaching this time around, my experiences are tempered by sharing the classroom with my wise mentor teacher.
Today was one of the good days. I've been teaching math on my assigned days, and yesterday, although I had planned carefully, felt a little rough. My timing wasn't quite right so the kids had too little time to work, and I had to pause often to regain their focus. After school my MT and I identified a common point of confusion (why do you multiply and not divide when calculating the tax on an item?) and knew that I should try to address this in today's warm-up.
Today's lesson looked like this:
5 minutes: "Math in the News" - making sense of some key statistics about literacy and poverty in Haiti (kids are collecting money for earthquake victims there); Weekly Math Puzzles - introduced new puzzles, kudos to last week's participants
5 minutes: went over answers to homework; kids self-corrected
5 minutes: demo about why multiplication works with calculating tax. My MT had noticed that a couple of students solved yesterday's problems by repeated addition, and we realized that this was a crucial link in understanding. Using document camera, and scenario of buying a $3 cup of coffee with 6% tax, had a student actually lay out the bills, and then add the corresponding pennies to demonstrate tax.
3 minutes: another student demonstrated his mathematical process for using repeated addition; tied this to solving with multiplication
5 minutes: Warm-up: "You have $20 in your pocket. You want to buy a book for $7.50 and a game for $10.50. Sales tax is 8%. Do you have enough money? If so, how much do you have left over?" Students were asked to solve problem individually, but could talk to neighbors for help. Shared solutions. Pretty consistent success.
5 minutes: Intro to concept of tips (today's math focus). What are tips? How much do we usually tip at restaurants? What are some strategies people use to find tips?
40 minutes: Assigned math partners. Partners to work on investigation 4.2 (finding tips, as well as working with sales tax). Main problem involved making selections from a menu, calculating total food cost, then tax, tip, etc.
Assigning math partners was a huge help. Much less wasted time. Generally paired students similar in math ability/working speed. Purposely paired one low, often off-task pair and then targeted them for extra attention. Worked well because we had four adults (me, MT, and pair of grandparents) and only 19 students. Yes, I know how lucky we are!
Wow Suzanne,
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you are seeing a lot of first hand methods and strategies from our Literacy and differentiation studies in your main placement. This is valuable information. I am finding that at a first grade level (vastly different from middle level), finding such connections are variable. There is so much effort put into keeping the attention of students throughout the entire lesson through engaging curriculum choices. I did a class store activity for my observed lesson that used similar math strategies ($) as the activity you described in this post. The students had to make snack choices with ten pennies and calculate how many of each of the five snack choices they could buy, with varying snack prices. Although this seems like a fairly simple task, I am reminded that Piaget's stages may have validity. It was difficult for some students to do those simple addition equations using money, even though the lesson/curriculum was engaging. But then again, some days are better than others. Thank you for a thoughtful and positive post.
For more of Cammie's thoughts, go to http://cammie7cammie.blogspot.com
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