Math as a Second Language Day 2 (7/11/17)

Welcome back for day 2! We started the morning by reviewing some comments from yesterday’s evaluations. We want to make sure that everyone feels comfortable letting us know if you can’t hear what we’re saying, or if you’re unclear what you are supposed to be doing at any given time.

Also, a note about the curriculum: Many of the pages are marked “Reference.” These are designed for you to read and refer to outside of class time. In most cases, we make sure that the key ideas for the “Reference” pages emerge in the discussion in class, but we don’t spend time actually going through the reference pages during class.

For our first activity of the morning, we reviewed the homework, “Rules that Expire.” Each table created a poster for one of the rules discussing when it is useful and when it fails.

Andrew shared a new worksheet he had created to help share different ways we use addition. Notice how addition can be cued by words that we more commonly associate with subtraction! (For instance, “less than” can be used to create an addition problem.) We discussed how some of these problems are better modeled by adding amounts, while others can be modeled as lengths, or as positions on the number line.

Next, we spent some time on the Commutative and Associative properties of addition. Groups discussed how to use counters, or the number line, to help their students understand these properties. One group shared a method using a post-it note to represent grouping counters in parentheses, and then demonstrated how they could stack the counters to show their students the associative property.

Next, we discussed the idea of “subtraction as take-away”. Many flavors of subtraction don’t really feel like they involve taking something away! Andrew pointed out that this is one of the reasons that research shows that subtraction is the hardest operation for students to understand.

After lunch, we were introduced to the Adjective-Noun theme. Numbers are adjectives modifying some noun. We discussed how important it in in addition and subtraction to make sure that the nouns match. You add the adjectives and keep the nouns. The adjective-noun theme can help to motivate the idea of place values, and the addition and subtraction of fractions.

Before the afternoon break, we watched a video from Veritasium about dual-process theory: http://veritasium.com/education/the-uncomfortable-effort-of-thinking/

Math Homework:

  1. Read Block 2, pp 7 -8. Generate 3 math problems (with numbers appropriate to your grade) to represent 3 different boxes on the grid.
  2. Complete Block 2, page 9, #2.

Pedagogy Homework:

  1. Read Cathy Seeley’s chapter: Message #1: Smarter Than We Think: Helping Students Grow Their Minds.
  2. In your notebooks, write a response to these prompts:
  • What struck you about the content of the “Smarter Than We Think” message?
  • What are a few connections that you see between this reading and the reading from Principles to Actions from last night?

 

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