When I started this school year, I knew that I wanted my students to master their facts by October so that they would not struggle during the Multiplication and Division units… So I set up this bulletin board to motivate them to move their car along the Multiplication Grand Prix. I was inspired by the popular Multiplication Grand Prix game on Arcademics, but this did work to motivate most of my students to move their cars along this race track.
I love making MATH relevant and finding a way to tie it into current events. Back in October, we celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month with a math review game! They learned some facts for their scavenger hunt, and they got to find math problems hidden around the classroom. I made this a little challenging for the students by using Spanish numbers around the classroom.
At the end of the school year, I like to have my students complete a research unit. Last year, we focused on HEROES! Students had to complete 3 assignments with this project: A Hero Tale, a Hero Newspaper, and a Hero Poem. My colleague and I created graphic organizers for each part of the project.
You can click the image below to enlarge.
Moving from Washington, DC to Texas was a huge transition in and of itself… But when you add the differences in the teaching content, it was even more drastic. In writing, the differences were most pronounced! In DC, our students wrote in the context of a reading passage; it was more of a response or a find details to support the conclusion that you have drawn. In Texas, on the other hand, students are asked to write about their own experiences and organize it in a one page-26-line paper. In DC, they may be given up to 4 pages to flesh out there response. You can easily see how MY mindset had to change in order to prepare my Texas students. What I relied heavily upon were graphic organizers to give students a checklist and help them remember the brainstorming and planning steps. It helped in the end because by the end of May, my students knew what elements to include in their writing to have a quality composition.
In Texas, the teaching standards for 4th grade a mostly similar to Common Core for math, but they veer in a completely different direction with the unit on Personal Financial Literacy. I wish I had learned these skills when I was coming up, so I LOVE teaching them to my students. Well, we spent a few weeks talking about budgets, fixed expenses vs. variable expenses, income, and savings… And then I wanted the students to put these skills into action!
In this research project, students had to choose a career, find the median salary for this career, create a budget based on the median salary, find a car to purchase online, find a place to live online, and then put whatever leftover money they had towards savings. The budget was created in Excel, and there were formulas for students.
After their budget was completed, the students were ready for the real work of researching their job. Their final product was going to be made into a book, typed from Microsoft Word. To prepare for this, I created a graphic organizer (packet) that helped them find and source the information and then led them to writing each paragraph. There were sentence starters in 3 of the 6 chapters, as well as a bonus chapter for extra credit. Students were given the choice of their book design, and once they selected their design, their Word document would open, which was a book template that they were able to customize. This book has a plethora of text features, like a graph, a glossary, citations page, table of contents, section headings, italics, bold print, photographs, and captions, etc. I am excited about seeing my students’ final products!
In the meantime, here are images from my sample/example book that I shared with my students.
Also, here is a link to our project website, which has most of the resources that my students used. The graphic organizer or project summary page are not posted here.
http://monthlybudget.edublogs.org/
Last year, the school I was at had a subscription for ST Math. I am a believer in the effectiveness and usefulness of the ST Math program by Mind Research! It was not my teaching curriculum, but it was a tool in my tool belt that allowed me to give my students the time and chance to apply the skills that I taught. The program gives immediate feedback to the students and amazing visualizations of the major skills that they are expected to know. I used the following spreadsheet to track all 4th grade students at my school last year. I used the data to show me who needed more time on the program and to project where they would most likely be at the time of our high stakes testing, the DC CAS. The goal was for students to reach 75% syllabus progress in the game by the time of the test. I taught all but 11 of these students in math, and for those that needed more time on the program, I would tailor their instruction time. That being said, I would ensure that they received a math lesson each day, as well as some time to apply the new skill. Then, I would send them to the computers or iPads, and have the other students work on an advanced lesson. I would even have the students that were further along on ST Math to coach their peers, helping them think to get to the answer, rather than just telling them the answer. I would also send this spreadsheet to my colleagues each week, so that they could see who also needed more time on the computer program and allow them to log on to the program when appropriate.
This was the final ST Math wall at the end of the school year. The majority of the 4th graders had reached 100% completion. Even more exciting was the fact that all but one of the students on my roster reached 100% completion.
My students love rap, and I love when they are engaged in the lesson. I found a rap beat, and then I wrote some lyrics to help them remember how to find coordinate points. They loved the song, and I would often hear them rapping the lyrics on the playground. Needless to say, this lesson was successful!
Below is a video of a 5th grade lesson taught to my 4th graders at the end of the school year.
Ms. Payne’s Math Lesson – Multiplying Fractions from Victoria Payne on Vimeo.
At the end of our Fractions and Decimal Equivalence unit, we played a new math review game inspired by the March Madness tournament. I created this game so that all teams had an opportunity to work at their own pace and review the content. The rounds were fast, and there were at least 2 teachers in the room to make sure everyone was on task. I had my 3 highest students that knew the content solidly to grade the work from the teams, so that the teachers could focus on monitoring the student teams and peer coaching. These high students were also responsible for adding points to the score board each time a team correctly answered problems.
We did not have any issues of student engagement during this game, as all teams really felt they had a chance to win the game. As papers came in, they were quickly graded, and the team points were constantly going up. All of the teams had mixed ability levels so that there was equity. In addition, each player had to write, so this necessitated the peer coaching. While points were tallied up, players had a chance to make shots in the room on the mini basketball net.
The final part of the game was our elimination rounds. These rounds were quicker than the qualifying rounds. In the end, only one team won. In both sessions that we played this game UCONN won, and 2 or 3 weeks later, it was such a joy to see that the men and women’s teams at UCONN won the real March Madness!
Finally, a few weeks after we played this math review game, we organized a March Madness basketball tournament the Friday before our high stakes state testing started to let the students relax and get rid of stress and anxiety. There was no content whatsoever in this game – just teams of 3 and their b-ball moves!
Below are some of the slides from our March Madness Math Review game.
One of the ways I love to review math content and encourage my higher students to coach/tutor the other students is to create math review games , where I form teams of mixed abilities. One of the first games we played as a grade level this year was the B-Ball Challenge. The original intention was to incorporate the basketball net, but time escaped us. Still students had the ability to review multiplication and division concepts in preparation for the first benchmark test of the school year. I chose the basketball theme since I know so many of my students love the game – as do I! The teachers were the refs for our game, and we each wore our black and white stripes. In addition, I brought out my voice amplifier for the real surround sound effect, and the kids were besides themselves!
Here’s how we played the game. The highest 5 students for the grade level were given the role of coach and given a tie to wear. All of the others students were assigned a player number for their respective teams. Coaches could only coach students to the correct answer, but could not actually answer any questions or a foul would be called. Coaches would also send up players for each “play.” These players would have a set time limit to solve or answer the question on their boards. Correct responses earned a point. Incorrect responses could be “rebounded” if someone from their team had correctly solved the problem on their board on their “team’s bench”. In addition, if a player did not know how to solve the problem on their board and they were on the “court,” they could ask their coach to call a “time out.” Then the coach would be able to coach the player to help them get to the correct answer. Coaches had up to 4 player strips for each player, 3 time-outs, and 2 rebounds, so they had to use their strips strategically. Since all players were writing on their boards and coaches were always coaching, we had maximum participation during each play. Teams got a point for correct responses.
