WEEK 6

Both my ALiM and class have been exploring fractions. As a teacher I am aware that I have never really used materials and equipment much, perhaps my lack of understanding of how to make the most of them, or my teacher training, and not reading enough research. However this ALiM teaching has taught me how effective materials and equipment are in helping students get the concepts. They are more likely to retain and transfer this understanding to other problems if they get the concepts rather than just learning strategies and processes which has been my main teaching. So my in-class group have really shown they get the strategies for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions. In fact they are so confident, they have taught the rest of my class and created training videos using Explain Everything for our blog and website. However when working on fractions of a whole they keep saying, "I don't get it!" I have to admit I was getting frustrated, I taught the strategy, I folded paper but still... So with my ALiM group I started exploring student activities with fraction blocks, paper folding and the big ah ha moment, dividing shapes into 1/4's and 1/3's then sharing beans, of course related to a word problem. They got it, so more of this for my class next week.

As part of our Algebra learning (all other classes are covering this this term) and to help front load and support my ALiM students we have been solving picture problems and of course creating them for the classes to try and solve. Using these picture problems has been the easiest and most successful way for me to teach Algebra so far. We have also been exploring sequential growing patterns, although finding rules are more challenging.

In-class Group