Math Week 3
September 15th - 19th
Pre-Assessments: Collecting Data
This week I pulled each child in EC 1 for a counting assessment. I scored and tabulated the data to look for class trends and level trends. This allows us to come together to look at the data to make instructional decisions, determine whole class focus areas, as well as develop intentional small groups to support children where at their instructional level. The exciting thing is that many of our EC 1 students have 1-to-1 correspondence, can recognize numbers, and can count! In fact, roughly two-thirds of EC1 students are already meeting counting expectations for the end-of-year. This allows us to continue to move them forward and think about ways to deepen and enrich their understanding of numbers and counting. There is a plan to collect pre-assessment data in EC2 next week.
Intermediate has administered a level-wide problem solving pre-assessment based on the CGI problem types. They are currently working hard to code all of the data to determine their next course of action to inform their instruction as well as their math groups.
Level Math Meetings Begin
On Thursday, Megan and I met with the Intermediate team to check in and begin a dialogue on multiage and differentiation. The teachers are off to a great opening and have worked hard to develop routines and procedures, introduce math journals, create flexible groupings, and learn about their budding mathematicians. They are very thoughtful about the tasks they are posing their students. Together we set a 6-week plan with clear goals for student outcomes, while allowing flexibility in how it will look on each team. Over the next 6 weeks, students in Intermediate will be working on place value (building and decomposing numbers from 10,000 to one million) We want students to have flexibility in decomposing numbers, to build academic vocabulary, and to develop strong conceptual understanding of the value of numbers. Though the context of place value, students will also be working on problem-solving, where their focus will be strategy development for addition and subtraction problems manipulating 3-digit to 5-digit numbers. They want every child to be comfortable using 2(+) strategies and to be comfortable sharing their strategies with one another. We launched a dialogue about the structures used to differentiate for the wide-range of mathematicians and this conversation will continue at our next level math meeting. We have agreed that we want to be flexible so that our mathematicians are not always grouped in the same way and so they don’t think that math is “always” one specific structure. We want students working in whole groups, small groups, pairs, and we want those groups to be intentional, but changing frequently because mathematicians learn from each other and need to talk to other mathematicians who think like them as well as those who do not think like them. The intermediate team is going to explore different structures for differentiating in a multiage classroom over the course of the year. Intermediate is off to a great start!
Coming soon…
Megan and I will soon be meeting with Upper teachers to plan warm-ups with the focus on relational thinking. We will also find a time to meet with Primary teachers in the near future to support documentation and differentiation. EC teachers will soon be meeting to go over Pre-Assessment data and next steps.