To begin a couple of quick reminders... Our first Math Olympiad contest with 4th and 5th grade is on Tuesday, November 15. Report cards will be coming home this week. If your child is in my math class, their math grade comes from me. Reading and writing grades are determined by work in homeroom. The time they spend with me is considered enrichment so the work we do is not graded. Let me know if you have questions. This week I would like to help parents understand why math learning may look different from when we were in school. I feel like this information is most timely for the 4th grade parents who have been watching their students learn to perform long multiplication (and soon long division too!) You may remember how when you were in school, there was one method taught by your teacher, you memorized the steps, and did the tasks assigned. I heard a lot of the 4th graders come to school and say, "My mom/dad tried to show me this other way, and it didn't make any sense." We do ultimate want students to learn the standard algorithm mainly because it is, in most cases, the most efficient. However, we want to make sure students understand how and why math works now. Let me see if I can share rationale behind what some term "new math." Let me share some images from the 4th grade math curriculum, and show you how we try to build a full understanding of math and concepts instead of just teaching a procedure. But also how ultimately, they will learn the standard algorithm with understanding intact... I found another teacher blog that I think makes the rationale clear why we don't begin with the standard/traditional algorithm anymore like the "olden days." I will summarize the points and attach the link here for the details: https://medium.com/i-math/common-core-math-is-not-the-enemy-c05b68f46b3e#.1vtlxy5if Why don't we teach only standard algorithms anymore? 1. Students forget. Learning steps and memorizing them with no "why" doesn't make for good long-term memory. 2. Students aren't machines. We are preparing students for jobs that will require problem solving and that requires them to understand "why" not just perform tasks. 3. Students have number sense. We need to build on their prior understanding and scaffold their learning. While the traditional algorithm seems so logical to us as adults, the standard procedure to a 4th grader begins to defy what they know about numbers and place value and math and is not inherently logical to them. One more update this week...5th Grade language arts and creativity students got the chance to share a creative writing project that we had started in honor of Halloween. The students were working on slowing down a story to write about the setting by showing and not telling. They were writing descriptive paragraphs that could fit into a larger story later if they chose. I like to do this project around Halloween because we watch a video on YouTube of the most beautiful abandoned places on earth. Most of these pictures, although beautiful, are a little creepy too. The kids pick one of the locations and pretend they are in this location, using all of their senses to describe what their character is experiencing while there. It is interesting to think about what might have really happened there, but the kids have just as much fun creating a completely fictional account of an experience there. Below is the video you can watch. Then read a couple of the examples and see if you can pick out their location from the video.
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Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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