What's the Question?

What makes a good Math teacher? 

"Use group problem-solving to stimulate students to apply their mathematical thinking skills (Artzt & Armour-Thomas, 1992)"

Working on our problems

As part of our continued math Talk, we have been spending a lot of time on word problems. I think it is important to students to approach them from all angles. This includes looking at them backwards by writing the questions. I loved this resource called What's the question?  by Brandi Wayment from The Research based Classroom.  I am firm believer in saving time and if someone has already created a great resource, use it! You then free up more time to work on other projects for your students. This is a great resource. Basically, it is a large set of sheets like the above that give the answer.

Love her story for how the last bird showed up. 

We walked through a demo. of this very problem as a class first. I told my students it is easiest to write the number sentence first.  We then decided that writing the story would be the next logical step before writing the question. Drawing the picture next would have been fine too. As for the drawing, we discussed how spending a lot of time drawing birds over and over again would not be a good use of our math time so we decided that it would be fine to use X's to represent the birds.

I then sent them off in pairs to work on their own problems. They were instructed to not use the problem we had come up with as a class. My students really enjoyed this activity. They are also enjoying working with their compass buddies. One thing that I have learned from this Capstone project so far has been that I was not giving my students enough time to work in pairs on math questions. It is so nice to be able to walk around and hear all of the math talk going on.

Their picture of the birds on the wire is great! 

Math Literacy Bags

Our math Literacy bags are starting to take shape. This is something very new to me and an exciting part of my research project for my Capstone class. After coming up with some Math resources that I want my students to use over and over again, I decided that a ziploc bag would be the perfect place to store all of our Math Literacy items. These are going to be fun to use over the year.

In the bags we have:

Our Journals were added first 

1. Interactive Math Journals 
I scoured the internet and found many great resources for Math journals and prompts. I now have a large collection of prompts that should last me thoughout the year! I took all of the prompts and sorted them. These journals will consist of three main kinds of entries-
     1.) Concept or task prompts- these are actual questions or word problems to answer and show your work and ideas:
      Ex./ Joe has 19. Sam has 30. Who has more cars? How many more? How do you know? Show how you figured it out. Explain what strategy you used to solve this problem.
     2.) Process prompts- these are more of the how do you style prompts. some examples are:
    -Write a letter to your teacher explaining what you understand about the topic                              
      - When I read a math textbook and see a word that I don’t know, I ...
      -How did I get the solution?
     -Describe the graph of…as if you were explaining it to a friend over the phone.
     -When I see a word problem, the first thing I do is…then I…
     3.) Affective prompts- these are more personal
       -I want to become bette at math so that I…

       - People who are good at math…

       -My best/worst experience with math was…

       -When it comes to math I find it difficult to…

       -When I hear someone say “Math is fun!” I…

       -Describe what mathematician  does.

       -If I were better at math, I would…

A great vocabulary package

2. A Math Vocabulary Reference book
I found this fantastic resource at K-5 Math Resources website. I have printed off the Math vocabulary reference book and added it to the math bags. This booklet should last all year as it contains words from all of the domains that we will cover over the course of the year. I purchased this package from K-5 Math Teaching resources as part of a grade 3 bundle. It came with a journal prompts booklet, a math projects booklet (more to come on this!) and this vocabulary package. In my opinion, it has been a great value so far. You can find the bundle here. 

3. Math vocabulary word books
I found these freebies on teachers pay teachers.  They use the Frayer model for vocabulary development. I love how this model uses examples and non-examples as these are perfect for Math. we will add our new words to these books as we go. You can grab these freebies here. 

Our Compass buddy chart

4. A compass buddy chart
I LOVE this idea. You may have heard of the idea of Clock buddies before. Laura Candler has taken this idea and transformed it into a compass! Perfect as it will also meet the goal of having students familiar with direction and a compass.   You can download the sheet that we use here. 

Fill-in and add to the bags 

Our Math Talk Prompt sheet facing out

5. Partner math talk prompts

 I found a partner literature talk sheet for free and changed the prompts from literature prompts to Math prompts. In our bags, we have this sheet facing out so students can use it for reference easily. I have also gotten them to place their compass buddy sheet on the opposite side facing out for the same reason. Our journals and vocabulary books are sandwiched in the middle. You can download the sheet I made here.