I met the students the second week and September. To begin in math, I gave them each a math journal and asked them to create a web of what they thought math was. I wanted to get a sense of what they knew and what assumptions about math that they were bringing to grade 3 and how they were able to represent their thinking. A couple of examples follow:
I also had students do a WNCP assessment to assess the grade 2 concepts and skills and it involved some problem-solving as well. During the first few weeks, we also played some card and dice games, I had students share mental math strategies for addition questions and we worked with ten frames and the hundred chart on the Smartboard. The Smartboard is newly installed in the school and the students are fascinated with it. We've been playing BUZZ to practice our multiple counting as we sit in a circle. We are still just working with single multiples. We also investigated increasing patterns using materials and numbers. The students created increasing patterns with unifix cubes and then described them using numbers and words.
Each Wednesday, I do a special problem-solving session with all the grade 3s in the school. So far, we have: 1) read the book One Duck Stuck and figured out how many animals helped the duck get unstuck, 2) used quarters, dimes and nickels to figure out how many different ways there are to make 30cents, 3) read the book Two Ways to Count to Ten and chose a number between 10 and 30 and figured out all the different ways to count to that number (2's, 3's, etc) and 4) read the book The Tree that Grew to the Moon and did the classic Marilyn Burns problem with pattern blocks.
The students have already come a long way in thinking about how they can represent how they solved a problem. We don't record in our notebooks all the time - many times we discuss the problem orally. My goal is for students to be fluent in communicating and representing mathematics in many different ways.
*Please note: In order to protect the privacy of my students, I am not revealing the name of the school I am teaching at. I will also not include any photos of the students' faces on this blog and their names will be taken off any work samples that are shared here.
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