Our school is a Title I school trying to provide the always changing resources needed to coordinate with the current educational standards which also change often.
With the upcoming school year, I am fortunate enough to be teaching a great group of sixth graders.
This group of students comes from a small, rural school that houses approximately three hundred kindergarten through sixth-grade students. Most of these students come from low-income and low socioeconomic status homes.
These particular students are high-energy and have the ability to design and create wonderful things with their academic successes. One obstacle they face is not having the resources needed to support their creativity. Teachers foster independence and to think "outside the box" to find ways to meet the students' needs the best we can, but the financial needs are greater than most teachers can provide.
My Project
One of the hardest applications of math is having to defend your thinking. Students can learn computational steps but when it is time to explain why they chose their answers, many cannot express those thoughts.
Explaining and justifying the thought process that comes with multi-step math problems requires lots of practice and math discourse.
The goal of my project is to provide my students with the experience and tools they need to state their math claims and defend their answers. My students have been working on weekly math debates. The podium I am requesting will become a weekly practice space of verbally defending their thought process to their classmates. This podium will house a document camera we already have. Students will take turns coming to this podium, showing their evidence under the document camera, and explaining the steps they took to come up with their solutions. As we practice this over a period of time, more students will become active participants and feel more confident in discussing math. The practice of thought processing will make it easier to transfer their verbal thinking to written thinking. Please help my students to "stand and justify"!
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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. Prichard and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.