S16: Blog 1: Back to Business and Back to Busy

In many ways I was excited for the new semester to begin. I was feeling ready to get back to work and to see my students again for the first time in a month. However, the first week back is not one of my favorite times of the semester when it comes to classes. I often feel overwhelmed when I have to sit in class and listen to the professor go over the syllabus. It always makes me feel like I have a million things to do right away. The truth is the work is spread out over the course of months, although there is still plenty to do, like reading, day-to-day. It’s making my head spin now but I am looking forward to this semester of learning about planning, social studies, math, literacy, and exceptional education.

The best part of my week by far was being there when my students showed up to school on Tuesday morning. They were so happy to see me! It was nice to know that I was missed and that they were glad I was back. I’ve managed to settle back in fairly quickly with my CT and students. Today felt like a normal Thursday when I got to spend the last hour of the day working with my group of struggling students in math. My students are gearing up for a unit test tomorrow so they were completing a chapter review. This unit was a bit of a break from the adding and subtracting on which they spent all of last semester working. This unit had to do with data and different kinds of graphs, like bar graphs and picture graphs. My small group of students experienced significant trouble with addition and subtraction concepts last year but appear to have a good grasp on this unit. They enjoy being able to draw pictures and create the graphs. I also believe it is helping them to have the visual representation that their graph provides when they are doing the questions that go along with it.

Something our professor for our math course asked us to think about was what we are seeing during math time. We read a section of our textbook that was about “doing math” (Van De Walle et al., 2016, pg. 13). This means that students are being active learners and finding different strategies and to solve a problem and choosing which ones works the best for them or for the particular problem. Something that I observed over the past semester and the last few days is how my CT excels at asking our students about the strategies that they use when solving problems. For example, today when the students were doing the “Problem of the Day” they were several ways in which they could have solved on of the problems. They could have made a number sentence but also could have counted on instead.

Because of this, I was able to adjust how I went about helping my small group of students. I realized that there was more than one way for them to do or understand many of the problems; I just needed to find what worked for each of them. Something many of the students, not just my group, were having trouble with was the concept of figuring out “how many more” or “how many fewer” when comparing parts of a bar graph or picture graph. I was able to see that drawing worked for some of them while others needed a more thorough explanation of what the question was truly asking. I found that one way to engage with the students and give them another visual representation was to have them hold up, for example, the number of books Bob had on one hand and the number of books Joe had on the other. I then had them put their hands together to see how many were able to pair together. So if Bob had 5 and Joe had 3 they would be able to see that 2 of their fingers didn’t have a partner, thus showing them that Bob had 2 more books than Joe or that Joe had two fewer books than Bob.

It’s great to be back at school, stress about classes and homework notwithstanding. I look forward to getting back to teaching some reading and social studies lessons during the week and getting more involved in math and science lessons throughout the semester. I think 2016 is going to be a wonderful year!

Addresses FEAPS 3 c and h

References:

Van De Walle, J., Karp, K., & Bay-Williams, J. (2016). Elementary and Middle School Mathematics: Teaching Developmentally (9th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson.

#EDE4942 #FEAPS3C #FEAPS3H #VanDeWalle