This year has brought the opportunity for me to participate in a First Steps in Mathematics training group in our school division. This course focuses on building the basic math competencies, the "First Steps in Math".
From our last session, a few things popped out to me as important areas that I need to be spending more time on in my classroom. The first of these is place value. Place value is an area that we all teach, but I had not been spending time asking myself if my students really understand what those places mean and the patterns that exist between the places. I know that they could all tell me that there are 10 groups of 10 in 1000, but do they understand that there are 100 groups of 10 in 1000? I asked my Grade 5 students the question "How many $100 bills would it take to pay someone $25 000". This led to a very good investigation in place value in which we used the Digi Blocks to explore the patterns that exist between the places. We have been talking about these patterns a lot this week and I feel that through this and through hands-on experience, my students are finally starting to really understand this concept.
Our discussion of place value then turned to teaching the place values in decimal numbers. The simple thing that stood out to me was teaching students that the units place is a line of symmetry. If they know that the next place to the right is tens, then they will know that the next place to the left is tenths. We are just moving into this in Grade 5, but I am hoping that this will help my students with this concept.
We also discussed the area of problem solving. There are 3 main types of problems that we can use with students. They are:
1) Result unknown- This is our typical problem in which students must find the end answer. ex- Leanne has 43 stickers. Her sister gives her 23 more. How many does she have now?
2) Change unknown- The original quantity must be changed. ex- Seth has 43 hockey cards, but he wants to have 75. How many more does he need?
3) Start unknown- The original quantity is unknown. ex-
I realized that I do a lot of result unknown problems, a few start unknowns, but I rarely give my students change unknown questions. Being aware of the 3 types of problems has made me aware of my need to start using different types of problems in my teaching.
Another focus was ensuring that students understand the inverse relationship between addition and subtraction (and multiplication and division). This is something that I am still struggling with how to effectively teach my students. Any suggestions???
Well, there’s my First Steps Day 2 training in a nutshell. Please feel free to offer suggestions for teaching these concepts and to also share any info from sessions that you are attending.
