Today we discussed the burning questions from yesterday and found that some of the material we are covering is important to help teachers of younger grades to prepare their students for material they will be learning at a later time.
We discussed solutions to the math homework problems and then moved on to discuss addition, subtraction and many different ways to interpret the action. We also tackled signed numbers and how to deal with addition and subtraction of these with the tally method and the number line methods. We made the connection that addition and subtraction are connected and often times the problems is better thought of as one or the other.
We discussed the issue of subtracting a negative number from a positive number with chips and how we can represent the concept of one-half on a geoboard.
The pedagogy homework led us to a discussion of how our different curricula fit with the levels of cognitive demand explained in our book “Principals to Action” and what levels are required of our students in our classroom lessons and homework.
We finished with some more problems and are looking forward to learning about multiplication tomorrow.
From your feedback we realized that some students are struggling with the handshake problem and how to create a formula that represents the situation when the number of people is very large. This will have an impact on the homework for tonight but we will be addressing it again tomorrow. I am going to make another post of a way to think about the sums that you can look at if you are still struggling with this idea.
Homework: Read Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg and P to A 42-48. In your notebook identify a procedure or a skill that you consider essential for your students at your grade level to learn. Describe the conceptual understanding that support students’ learning of the procedure or skill.
Also – the library problem and the writing the word problem from page 3.16.