My Other Math Sites
Lessons From the Classroom
Dear New Teachers
Congratulations! Whether you’re a brand new teacher or you have a new assignment, whether you’re in a new building or you’re returning to the classroom, I wish you all the best.
Take attendance each day out loud. I wish I could take back the days when I just looked at the empty desks to mark down the absentees. I thought I was being efficient. Greet students each day by saying their names and acknowledging their presence:
I’m so glad you’re here.
How was your game yesterday?
Your hair looks great like that.
Thank you for being here.
On days when everyone is present, I add, “Today is perfect already because you’re all here.”
Do math every day, especially on the first day. The kind of math where your students talk in groups for at least 75% of the time. If your principal tells you not to, they are wrong.
If you have plans to ask students to share/write about what they did over the summer, I will just let you know that I dreaded that assignment as a student. My family really didn’t go anywhere; guess we couldn’t afford to. We went nowhere and did nothing. That’s hard to expand on.
Tell your students an everyday story. Did anything happen in the last 24 hours (or over the summer) that you’d want to share? Be spontaneous. Make it quick. How was your dinner? The drive in this morning? Something funny your child/partner had said? This is not something you force or make up. You either have something light to say or you don’t. Here’s mine: Last week I asked my husband to teach me how to dive into the lake from the dock. (No, I had never done this before. I kinda know how to swim, meaning I don’t really know how.) He demonstrated, talking me through the motion. My turn — I assumed the proper dive position — and before I could change my mind, I did a belly flop. He laughed hard and asked me to try again. So, I gave it another shot. And I did it! I perfected the belly flop in my second attempt! My tummy and face hurt from the impact. I’d never seen my husband laugh this hard. He told me I was a champ.
For the longest time I had only two rules to tell my students on the first day of school: 1) never give up, and 2) never tell an answer. I would also tell them where to go should we hear the fire alarm. And that was it. I don’t know what possesses us to inundate students’ first day with a soul-crushing list of rules and procedures. We still have the next 179 days to tell them whatever else we need to tell them.
You can measure the students’ enthusiasm for your class quantitatively: time how fast they arrive at your door the next day. :) What teachers do is really hard, and I hope you’ll reach out to people who have your back. Always make family and yourself a priority. The students and the lessons should bring you joy. If they don’t, I hope you’ve saved up to start a vineyard.
Let’s do this.
Fawn
Fractions Operations Using Rectangles
A few days ago, Mary had replied to Nat’s tweet.
@fawnpnguyen is the queen of this. Pretty sure she has a blog post on it.
— Mary Bourassa (@MaryBourassa) May 14, 2021
God, I love Mary. She sent me a decadent chocolate bar from 2,800 miles away. She remembers my birthday when 2/3 of my children did not.
I am queen only in my own head, and no, I did not have a blog post on adding fractions. I thought surely there must be a wide assortment of videos on adding fractions using rectangles. But the very first two that I’d clicked on - this and this - really astonished me. They both used grid papers without using the grids. Like, what the heck.
Say we want to add 2/3 and 4/5, same two fractions that popped in my head when I replied to Mary.
Draw two same-size rectangles using the denominators as dimensions.
Students will ask, “Why 3 by 5?” If they don’t, you ask why. And you answer them by asking them to shade in 2/3 for one rectangle and 4/5 for the other. Give them a few seconds to do this and they’ll understand why the 3 by 5 rectangles work pretty well here.
We’re adding the fractions, so let’s combine them.
Similarly with subtraction of fractions.
For multiplication, the word “of” is useful. Of course, the commutative property of multiplication applies too.
To take 2/3 of 4/5, we’d look along the height in this rectangle as we can see the thirds and just grab two of the sections.
Likewise, taking 4/5 of 2/3 is to look along the width of 5 and grab 4 sections of it.
I’ve written about division of fractions previously:
Math Newsletters
It’s okay that there are 6 weeks left of school when I decide to revive a monthly math newsletter that I’d created for my district last year but stopped when the pandemic hit. I’ve been busy! I had 4 issues done by then.
Here is Issue 5 for May 2021.
I think a newsletter is a great way to share snippets of information and resources periodically. I hope to encourage you to start one if you haven’t already. As a TOSA, my audience is the teachers in our K-8 district. I take in the following considerations when creating this newsletter:
It’s a one-page deal. There’s a study that shows a high correlation between length of newsletter (or email) and how fast it gets deleted. (I don’t know of such study, but I’m willing to bet.)
Contains mostly consistent features. Mine has six:
Number Talks: One way to empower students is to have regular routines that invite students to share their mathematical thinking and allow for discourse, and I hope our teachers are doing that.
Visual Pattern: Because duh! :)
Problem/Puzzle/Quote/Fun Fact/Cartoon: Whatever you’d like to share!
Math Resource: There are so many! Make sure it’s something that you actually use and find value.
Featured Blog Post: I read/peruse a lot of math blogs when time permits. Being one of the editors for mathblogging.org helps. I try to find posts written by teachers, or at least written when they were in the classroom.
Good Read: I seem to have more math books than there are acronyms in education. I only feature the ones that I have read more carefully.
Please feel free to use mine as a template if you’re not sure where to begin. You want to include features where you have plenty of contents to draw from. We’re all busy, so committing to the publication of a regular newsletter should be something you want to work on rather than dread. Mine is set for monthly (during the school year) — okay, so I failed for the last 13 months — but you might set yours for quarterly. A weekly newsletter might be an overkill.
It’s a challenge to serve K-8 teachers in terms of specific contents, which is why it’s not my intent. But I hope that a first-grade teacher sees the May issue above and is encouraged to try a number talk that’s appropriate for their class and/or check out openmiddle.com to find the right grade-level task. They may find a visual pattern and have students use it to count the number of objects instead. As for the rest of the features, I hope we can carve out time to read and work on math problems in a recreational way.
I would love to see what you create!