Tools for Making Math Visible in Intermediate Grades
Help me give my students concrete models & tools to support their understanding of mathematical concepts! The Math Fluency Kit is perfect for my current professional development & comes highly recommended from members of the math community.
I'm a Numeracy coach that has the opportunity to work with students and teachers daily. I rotate to 3 different schools, so I work with K-5 students at 1 building, and grades 3-5 students at the other 2 buildings. I have the possibility of working with around 800 students across the 3 schools.
I love helping students development an appreciation for math!
I love seeing intermediate students understand something for the first time, through the use of math tools & making math visible. Being able to support teachers in getting these necessary tools, is so rewarding. My "students" are special because teachers are sharing their classes with me, and we're partnering to support them in their numeracy development. I love seeing my students in the hall, or after a few weeks of being away, and they can't wait to talk math with me or ask me when I'm coming by to play with math.
My Project
Students beyond the primary grades NEED concrete tools and models for math too! Rekenreks (especially the ones created by ETA hand2mind) help students to have a structure for numbers and to start developing fluency with facts... not just memorized facts, but facts that are truly understood. Rekenreks with red & white, help students to see groups of 5 and 10, which will help them with seeing connections between numbers & facts, and in turn deriving facts more easily. The ETA hand2mind fluency kits have multiple tools for making math visible for students. These tools can be used during math openers, mini-lessons, small group practice around fluency, or within work time. I can use them with students that I work with, but also educate teachers on how to use these materials on a day to day basis to support their students.
To see math is to understand it more completely!
There has been ample research to support the need for concrete models for students to develop their understanding of mathematical concepts; however, many classrooms stop using tools to visualize math along the way & expect students to go straight to abstract methods. Cognitively Guided Instruction (or CGI) describes this understanding of number sense & fluency as a progress (concrete to representational to abstract) and skipping ahead to abstract models, based on age or grade alone, doesn't work for kids because it's a developmental process.
On-going professional development for teachers is key in understanding what students need. Teachers today get so much their pd from the online math community. Many respected members of this community (i.e.Christina Tondevold & Graham Fletcher to name a few) advocate for tools & visual models for building understanding. Tools like base ten blocks, fractions tiles (without labels), dominoes with visuals for fractions/decimals, exposes kids to this!
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