1  Communicating – Speaking, Writing and Sketching – About Math! Sioux Falls, South Dakota June 7, 2011

3 Demonstrating math in the context of a story makes it relevant and more meaningful for students.

4 Making math relevant to students helps to engage them in their mathematics education and demonstrates that math isn’t just a school skill – it’s a life skill.

5 There are three ingredients in all my stories. Words Pictures Math

6 Studies have shown that students have the capacity to internalize and find relevancy in what they draw, and they easily make connections to other areas of learning through their image-making. Jessica Hoffmann Davis. Framing Education as Art: The Octopus Has a Good Day, 2005.

7 Visual Learning Practices Support Differentiated Instruction

8 Why Differentiate?

9  All students are different.  One size does not fit all.  Differentiation provides all students with access to all curriculum.

10 Differentiation is classroom practice that looks eyeball to eyeball with the reality that kids differ, and the most effective teachers do whatever it takes to hook the whole range of kids on learning. Tomlinson, 2001

11 General Principles of Differentiation:  Respectful Tasks  Flexible Grouping  Continual Assessment

12 Respectful tasks offer students the opportunity to explore essential understandings and skills at degrees of difficulty that escalate consistently as they develop their understandings and skills.

13 Flexible grouping permits students to move in and out of various grouping patterns. Grouping can be determined by ability, size, readiness and/or interests. They can be whole group, small group, or individual, and teacher led or student led.

14 Continual assessment is about making sure that the right students get the right learning tasks at the right time.

15 Differentiation can take place through:  Content  Process  Product

16 Differentiation is according to students’:  Readiness  Interests  Learning Profile

17 Anchor activities:  Puzzles  Games  Books  Manipulatives  Computer activities  Projects

18 The Birds: Assignment: Cut out a paper bird, about the size of your hand. Make it clever, creative and unique. It must have two legs, wings, and beak, (in other words be anatomically correct for a bird) Use at least 4 colors. Don’t let your friends see what type of bird you are creating. There were 25 birds in all, so 2 kids made 2 birds. 25 is a good number for fractions and percentages.

19 Once all birds were complete, the kids came to the carpet and we sorted the birds by all sorts of attributes. “This set of birds has pop- up wings, this set doesn’t.” or “This set of birds have something in their mouth.” When we created the sets, the kids had to come up with the corresponding fractions, and if possible, put that fraction into simplest terms. Like, “5/25 or 1/5 of the birds have striped legs.” After we agreed that the fraction was correct, we came up with percentages, knowing that each bird represented 4%.

20 Individual Fish Bowls: This was the first time doing this on their own. Homework Assignment- cut a symmetrical fish bowl and draw and color 12 fish. The next day in class, they water colored over the fish then completed the attribute chart.

21 The Coral Reef: Assignment: C reate something found in a coral reef. Make it clever and unique. We sorted coral reef creatures just like we sorted birds, the kids are getting more and more clever with their sorting rules. Once we found the fractions, percentages, decimals and new-ratio! (Ratio is NOT in the new content standards for grade 4 but it came very easily to the kids.)

22 Cathy Kuhns 4th Grade Teacher Country Hills Elementary School Coral Springs (Broward County) FL Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching, 1998

23 Response to Intervention:  Response: Behavior resulting from the application of a stimulus.  Intervention: To come between as an influencing force. Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2 nd Edition Visual Learning Practices support RTI:

24 Assessment:  Capabilities  Attitude  Behavioral Issues Intervention Strategy:  Monitor Student Progress  Maximize Student Achievement

25 RTI Related Visual Learning Practices:  Draw a Model  Make a Sketch of the Word Problem  Visualize the Math  Engage in the Math

26 Visual Instruction Strategies: Display materials that help to explain ideas. Have students search for real-life examples and report on their findings to the class.

27 Encourage students to sketch as part of their math note-taking process. Encourage students to draw models of word problems. Group students to work together to create models of new concepts.

28 Work with students to create concept maps of mathematical ideas. Maintain a math literature library in your classroom. Create visual models to help bring math to life.

We want our students to:  talk about math

We want our students to:  talk about math  sketch about math

We want our students to:  talk about math  sketch about math  write about math

We want our students to:  express their ideas  demonstrate their understandings  explore their creativity about math.

We want our students to:  be fluent in the language of math.

Thank you!