Help me give my students an extensive hands-on manipulatives kit to explore and understand EVERY math concept taught in fourth grade! They also need privacy partitions.
Our school has the highest ESL population in our district. 33% of our students see English as their second language. Both parents usually work and do not speak English so there is little or no support from home for homework.
Teachers are their only English contact and the only place where they can learn academics.
Students depend on us to give them an education without help from outside sources.
School is their only learning environment in English. They depend on teachers to provide the best academic environment that they can. Teachers need to every minute to count academically, because this is the student's only chance at learning.
Story problems are especially hard because of the comprehension in English that is required to understand what is needed to solve the problem
My Project
This kit will inspire my students to understand math and explore concepts that are new and difficult for them. Each manipulative will focus on a certain area in numeracy or math processing. For example, the Whole Number Place Value Cards witll teach my students how to write numbers in expanded form. Place value coins will show my students how many of which place value are represented by each number.
Just today I was doing RTI with one of my students and he said, "I'll never get subtraction, Mrs. Zealley, I'm just not good at math." I wished I had the Hands-On Regrouping Kit for Subtraction center from this kit to show him, he could DO subtraction and HE IS GOOD AT MATH!
He just needs to see it, not just learn the algorithm. This kit will essentially open up a whole new world to my struggling students.
Another student is really struggling with which strategy to use to solve a story problem. The What's the Best Strategy? Multiplication Center will cultivate math reasoning and which strategy would work best for a particular problem. Furthermore, The Hands-On Multiplication & Division Kit will give concrete examples to five of my struggling students. They could feel and touch regrouping and dividing.
Seven students in my class lack critical thinking skills and analyzing problems. They write the numbers down in the story problem in the order they are in problem and then raise their hand to ask which operation to use. The Analyzing and Understanding Story Problems center will give them step-by-step instruction on which operation to choose.
Finally my students will understand NOT just the "What we do", but also the "WHY we do this." Thus building critical reasoning skills that will last the student's lifetime!
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Zealley and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
