Weeks of Feb. 1 and 8: Mid-year Changes and More

Note: This seems to have evolved from a weekly blog to a biweekly publication, at least for the time being. We have had a lot of short weeks for various reasons, but it is likely to become weekly again soon.

As we get to the middle of the school year, we exchange our weekly schedule with that of Diane and Jeri’s group. The main reason for this is to balance out the number of times that we miss the same specialists again and again due to holidays which happen so often on Mondays and Fridays. Although activities in the home classrooms can be pushed back a day or two as needed, the specialists don’t have that flexibility. Our group will now have PE on Wednesday and Friday, so kids should be sure to have appropriate clothing and footwear — and our library day is now Thursday, so that’s when books should come back.

We’re getting close to the end in our literature groups. Some have finished their book and are starting to work on a related sharing project. The rest will finish up when we meet this Thursday (Feb. 18) and also start discussing project ideas.

On the other hand, new math groups have just launched. After doing math in our own classrooms during the month of January, we have now returned to blended math groups, involving all of the teachers and students in our building. We did our best to create some new combinations of students (although some did not change much) and also tried to change the teachers. This time, we have created 6 groups instead of 8, with Mark and Jeri working together with the 2 largest groups. In addition, Jen is coming in once a week to help with language development. Language is an important part of math instruction and communication, so her expertise is much appreciated.

Reasoning is another major component, and we work to develop and support that in several ways. One is through the use of “bar modeling” — an excellent strategy that is part of Singapore Mathematics. Students create visual models of the elements of a problem before they try to solve it. It makes it possible to solve problems that seem to require algebra but can actually be solved this way, too. A wonderful website that helps students become confident about this approach is found here:

http://www.mathplayground.com/thinkingblocks.html

(Thank-you to Diane for finding this resource.)

Another way we support reasoning is by asking for multiple strategies for solving a single problem. “Did anyone do this a different way, or can you think of another way now?” We ask students to justify their answers, usually in conversation but sometimes in writing.  We actively discourage arbitrary “tricks” and rote learning, although it is definitely helpful to be quick with math facts if you can.

One group is working right now on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with negative as well as positive numbers. Instead of giving them a list of forgettable rules without any rationale (such as a negative times a negative is a positive), we work with students’ number sense and the relationships among the operations so they can figure out what the sign of the answer should be. For example, (+5) x (-9) is the same as adding up a column of five negative nines. You end up with a whole pile of negatives: 45 of them, to be exact. This means that (-5) x (-9) has to result in the opposite (+45). Similarly, if we know that multiplication is the opposite of division, we can use that understanding to put the correct sign on a quotient that involves integers:  (+45) ÷ (-9) has to be five. But is it negative five or positive five? We can figure it out by multiplication. It has to be negative 5 because that’s the only way we’ll get positive 45 when we multiply the quotient by the divisor. You don’t have to memorize rules if you can get the right answer by thinking about it.

We’re about to cast and launch rehearsals for “Macbeth, the Musical Comedy.” I read/told the class a short summary of the actual play last week. Although somewhat mystified by how a story so filled with death and treachery could be turned into a comedy, they are ready to take it on. They have had the full script shared with them on their GDrive and, we hope, will have read it through before we return to school on Wednesday. I’ll upload the songs this week. Our casting procedure is entirely open and random. That is, once we have clarified what the parts are, we draw students’ names one at a time out of a hat. When a child’s name is chosen, s/he gets to name the part s/he wants. We assume that everyone is capable of playing any role, so there are no auditions of any sort.

We are continuing to work on a comparative religion unit that is an extension of our study of Islam.  Students have been amazed to learn how many different belief systems exist in the world today. We have seen a short video on Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and students are doing research to go beyond that list. One student remarked, “It’s really strange to read about your own religion this way — as something to learn about from the outside.”

Students were also amazed to learn how many political parties there are in the United States, most of whom have selected candidates for President. Next year, we’ll elect the National Doughnut to learn how different voting methods (we’ll explore 5 or 6 of them) can lead to very different outcomes.

Coming up soon is our Life Skills 101 project. This takes place outside of the classroom. It’s intended to help students to gain some skills that they will need not only when they are living on their own but also (we hope) to enable them to become more helpful around the house right now. Stay tuned.

And finally, we want to solicit every parent’s help with a couple of grammar issues that we are correcting continually in the classroom. For a few students, there is still a lot of uncertainty about when to use many instead of much, as we hear them say things such as How much pieces of cheese can we take? For quite a few more of our students, the distinction between me and remains elusive. Me and Terry went to the park. Anything you can do to help your child to get these things sorted out will be appreciated. We don’t delve into a lot of grammar jargon, by the way. For the former issue, we explain that you use many for things you can count, such as pieces of cheese, and much for things that are expressed in an UN-countable way, such as ice cream or money: How much ice cream is left? How much money do we need for the book? For the latter error, we ask them to try the sentence with me on its own. Does Me went to the park sound wrong? Then so does Me and Terry at the start of that same sentence.