This blog is about my amazing learning as a teacher this includes my personal thoughts and reflections on education and the learning that happens in my classroom. You can find my resources at www.bit.ly/Soresources
I would like to think that I teach through Inquiry. I really try to keep all of my work about the kids and their thinking; however, I do find myself still leading discussions more than I would like. Then I learned about provocations. WOW! I know that I have previously blog about this subject but since that time I have tried to use them more. Today in science I did just that (at least I hope I did).
Here is what I did:
1) I got a bunch of experiments working on air and water
Center 1: AIR
Center 2: Water
(note: some of these items were for other provocations)
Center 3: Water Cycle
Center #4: Pollution
I then broke them into groups had books and iPads at the centers and asked them what do they observe? Wow, I couldn't believe the talk, the focus, and the engagement. Take a look at this shot:
Here the students were so engrossed in what was happening that they didn't even notice me. They were saying, "cool look its raining!" They were also using the vocabulary that we have been building before this through our watercraft project.
What did I learn?
1) Inquiry (true inquiry) is allowing planned exploration. Students really need time to explore and make observations about the subjects.
2) This takes a lot of planning. I been planning this for some time now (many thanks to my amazing PLN for their help in this). As I have been planning I had to think about questions, get all of the materials ready and even think about possible misconceptions.
3) True assessment. I was amazed at what the students had absorbed through previous books, the Watercraft project and our discussions.
4) Its a lot of fun to watch the joy and engagement of true learning
So if you haven't done provocations before, give it ago. Its a lot of fun and you would be surprised at what you will learn about your students.
Fractions have always been a passion of mine. Started researching the concepts in my math part 1 AQ class and have been fascinated ever since. I even ended up completing my Masters' of Education thesis in the subject. Through my studies I came across fractions, Marilyn Burns' fraction kit and games. I still haven't found something anywhere close that helps students understand fraction concepts like this kit.
For those not familiar with it, let me tell you about it. The kit in itself is very simple, it is five strips of paper. Each piece is to be cut to a corresponding fraction (halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and a whole).
Now you may ask yourselves how is this the best thing ever it's just a bunch of paper. It's the best thing ever because of the talk that it generates. Since finding this in my research I have done some modifications that really bring out the talk.
First and foremost, I have them create the kits. It does you no good to create them for your students. By them creating the strips, the students explore how fractions are division, fair sharing, why fractions are a part of a whole and many more fractional concepts.
Second, I created a context to go with the problem. As many of you know who read this blog, I truly believe in contexts. A good context makes kids think beyond arithmetic and focus on mathematical big ideas. For this problem I tell my students a story of how I need to clean up my mom's back yard, she has a huge yard and in payment my mom buys me a large party sub. Now many students now don't know what a party sub is because they don't sell them anymore, so you may have to show them a picture:
The students are so impressed and they can't believe that I would eat this much. Now I tell them that just before I was about to eat lunch one of my friends popped over. Now what? This continues all the way to eights, the door bell ringing every time we figure out portion we need to cut. For sixteenths I tell them this is what we are going to do as I really don't have sixteen friends; however by now we have really constructed a good understanding of the pattern that is happening. Now why this context. I like this context because it is a linear model like the strips. Having the sub also means students have to think about measurement and division because technically you cannot fold a sub, as all the pieces fall out. The other part is students often will try cutting the their strips horizontally instead of vertically. Now this also brings up interesting discussions about equivalency versus congruency but this context stops that because if students cut a sub horizontally they don't really get all of the sub.
Third I don't have the students label their fractions. When I have done this with my fours it was mainly because I didn't want them to associate a particular fraction with the strips whole. Basically, 1/2 strip is 1/2 of the kits whole not 1/2 somewhere else. A big misconception with students thinking is that a what they learn is he only representation of a particular fraction. When you label the students don't understand that the size of the whole matters. That 1/4 can be bigger than 1/2 depending on the size. However, now that I am in primary I see a whole new benifit, it makes students understand what a fraction is. Why is 1/4, 1/4? While my students where playing cover-up, one of Mariyln burns fraction kit games, they asked me which fraction is 1/4? I turned it around and asked them. They then just picked a random strip up. I the. Asked them why that one? This discussion continued as students explored that the amount of pieces that we break our sub into is our denominator and the amount we use is our numerator. If I had them label the fractions they never would have explored this concept and I would never have realized that they struggled with it.
The final change is the questions that I ask around this particular problem. It's not just to make the stud ets create the kit but to think about the big ideas around fractions. Have a listen to my grade two class discussion on fractions:
Day 1 of our Fraction Talk
Day 2 of the Talk:
It is quite interesting the talk that can come from building these kits and the big ideas that come from it. I have played this game in junior and primary and personally I would do this for middle school as well. In junior I start to add fifths, tenths, thirds, sixths, ninths, and twelves. By adding these other fractions you also start to see other misconceptions of students halving strategies but for primary halving is still okay. I hope you really try the kits and see the benefits of it in your classroom.
You can find all of my fraction research and resources on my site: Bit.ly/Soresources. Feel free to use anything you want.
I am writing this blog post as a documentation of a cool new inquiry project that my teaching partner Keri Ewart and myself (though more my teaching partner), called Water Craft. The purpose of this inquiry is to design new version of Minecraft called Water Craft. The students must include three of the big curriculum expectations:
Assess ways in which the actions of humans have an impact on the quality of air and water, and ways in which the quality of air and water has an impact on living things
investigate the characteristics of air and water and the visible/invisible effects of and changes to air and water in the environment
demonstrate an understanding of the ways in which air and water are used by living things to help them meet their basic needs
Now this project has been a spur of the moment (which to me are the best kind) so we will see how it goes. The hope is that the grade twos will be designing their own game system that answers these three questions. So far we have started by introducing our language centers which will give the students opportunities to explore the game, the writing portion and science.
We have also had the students play inside of the game and discover different components of MineCraft. The next stage is to start asking guided questions that students will have to answer in order to complete the big ideas and the actual making of a video game.
So what does this project look like:
1) This project is first linked to our science curriculum. The learning goals of the game is to teach these three big ideas above
2) It is also linked to reading, writing and our language centers. Students will be researching within their centers about water usage, conservation and characteristics. Each center is based on building toward the future; designing a game.
3) Lots of exploration.
What was needed to get this type of project started:
1) Lots of planning and forward thinking. Even though we decided on it at the last minute, my teaching partner and I have had to rethink through our curriculum needs and figure out how to interconnect all of tech into the curriculum.
2) We also had to give our students a lot of exploring time. I have found that whenever you introduce something new for the first time, students just really want to explore, so we did just that. The first day was all about exploration. The students played with mindcraft, they read and played the center apps and discussed as they went. We were also very lucky to have some grad students in from York to help use problem solve and work through playing the game.
3) we gave time to ask questions and answer some of them. After the student explored on the game, we had them come up with a list of questions that they would have to explore. The hope was that this would spur more inquiry and make the children think about what they are working towards.
Each week I hope to document the learning that is happening and reflect on the process. In the mean time if anyone has any other suggestions we welcome any advice or help. Stay tuned for more.
Today was our first formal lesson in patterning. What I mean by that is we have been discussing patterns but more in the context of number sense, where we have been learning to count by twos, fives and tens, as well as, doubling numbers. This type of talk has been focused on the magnitude of numbers and associated with place value not so much on growing and shrinking of patterns.
So today we started with a problem that was asking the students to sort eight sets of (patterns and none-patterns) into two categories, a yes it is a pattern and a no it is not a pattern. I have attached the patterns down below.
It was very interesting conversation around this. At first the students put only the repeating patterns in the yes category stating that for it tone a pattern then it had to repeat. I had to remind them about the book we read called patterns big and small. In this book they had a set of nesting dolls, I'm asked the kids did that pattern repeat? After that discussion the kids where better off explaining their reasons for their groupings.
I really liked this question because it made the students really think about what a pattern is and what attributes are needed to make a pattern. They obviously had worked with patterns in grade one but mainly with repeating patterns, which is why they at first they only made piles with repeating numbers. The non-patterns are also helpful because they can assist us with thinking about what attributes a pattern doesn't have and therefore in the end has.
Today we are going to be working on the justifying of their answers and then coming up with a definition of what a pattern is and is not. If your grade two or any grade for that matter I highly recommend this type of problem for your class.
