Daily Math Challenge: Upping the Rigor in Mathematics Instruction

All teachers (should) follow lessons plans and unit plans in order to make their instruction cohesive and make sense. I'm not going to get into all the aspects of following scaffolded, developmentally appropriate lesson plans, but if you're "winging it" everyday in the classroom without a clear focus, don't expect a lot of learning to take place.

The point of this post is taking a little timeout in math everyday to let students think and work through challenging, rigorous problems without an immediately evident solution. I call this activity "daily brain work," and it takes 10 minutes. The intent here is to pose a problem to the class, and to step away and let them work through the problem on their own. Students should be able to elaborate and articulate how they reached their solution. Finally, go over the problem, have some students share their answers, and hopefully at least a few have the correct solution to share.

In order to get started, I needed some multi step story problems. Don't start too difficult, and make sure that everything you give students is developmentally appropriate for the majority of the class.

Here are some resources to find multi step word problems and other math puzzles / brain workouts:

Math Multi-Step Word Problems

• 25 Word Problems at IQ Study Activities: A good starting point to find some straight forward story problems appropriate for 5th graders.
• A Few Pages of Story Problems at about.com: Nothing fancy, just some more story problems.
• Helping With Math Word Problems Guide: A page with some information on how to help students approach open ended questions, and a bank of questions as well.
• Challenging Word Problems at Math Top 10: Good stuff here, there's a lot of them too.

Brain Teasers / Math Puzzles

• Houghton Mifflin Grade 5 Brain Teasers: A nice little collection of word problems and brain teasers already set into CCSS categories.
• Math Salamanders Printable Math Puzzles: The whole salamander theme is a little bizarre, but there's a lot of good puzzles here. 

Primary Sources: The Perfect Fit for Informational Texts in the Common Core

I've been focusing a lot lately on informational texts as we move towards the Common Core adoption that is pretty much going into full swing next month, and with good reason. The informational text / literature split is very important moving forward, and failure to give it its proper due and focus heavily on it might actually cost you your job a few years down the road, it IS essential.

At the beginning, I focused a lot on resources. Where can I find informational texts? Are there resources out there for how I can use them properly in my classroom? I've already done some posts about this (see: Informational Text Free Digital Resources and The Informational Text Revolution).

Now, I'm starting to think about the connection to other subject areas (another major key in the CCSS). I've always considered myself a social studies teacher. Yes, I'm an elementary school teacher who teaches, and does a pretty darn good job of teaching, all subject areas. BUT, social studies, especially history, has always been my primary passion, and as my instruction in social studies has evolved to the point of students doing multiple research based projects, presentations, and doing some deep, relevant, technology and personally driven learning about history, geography, sociology, and economics, I've thought about how this all fits the CCSS.

I'm going as far as to say that implementing the CCSS in social studies might be the most exciting part of the CCSS adoption for me personally... well, it's actually pretty close between that and the changes it demands of math instruction from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade.

Social studies instruction is already built for informational text. Honestly, I think most of us in the elementary grades might not go deep enough with our instruction, or with student expectations when doing research, but that's not really the point here.

The point here is simple: Primary sources. The more I've been thinking on this subject and studying it, the more I am convinced that 5th grade students can read and analyze primary sources, and it's exciting. Some of the primary examples I've seen of implementing the CCSS in 5th grade involve reading and analyzing the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, and other great primary sources.

So with that in mind, I'm going to just throw some information and resources out there that I think can benefit all of us. I'll be listing a quick description of each of these multiple links:

These first links are to research articles, and other descriptions of the importance of primary sources within the CCSS:

• Common Core and ELLS: Key Shifts in Language Arts and Literacy : A quick article that lays out the shifts in moving to the Common Core. It very clearly shows how informational texts and primary sources fit within it all.
• Engaging Students With Primary Sources : A quick blog post from a social studies teacher that quotes the CCSS and clearly explains how primary sources fit in the standards and the classroom.
• Guidelines for Using Primary Sources in the Classroom : A pdf document from The National World War II Museum
• Primary Sources: At the Heart of the Common Core Standards : A great quick article on the Library of Congress website that makes it pretty clear how important primary sources are.
• Five Strategies to Infuse Common Core State Standards With Social Studies Instruction : A great little article that really got me thinking about how I'm going to use primary sources in my own classroom.
• Teaching With Primary Sources Journal : That's right, there's a whole journal on this topic. Check out this pdf, it's powerful stuff. 

Finally, I'm going to end with some resources that can be used with students, or can get you thinking more about using primary sources in your classroom:

• Teaching With Documents, Lesson Plans : From the National Archives website, there's some decent lessons here that really help when developing your own lessons. A good place to start.
• Using Primary Sources in the Classroom : A great pdf document from the Library of Congress that lists some great lesson ideas and some examples.
• Primary Sources for the Classroom : A pdf document from the state of Tennessee that might be my favorite of everything I've listed here. There's some stuff I want my students to read and take to heart as they start researching.
• Library of Congress Common Core Teacher Resource Center : If you don't know about this, wake up! This huge listing of resources can't be ignored. I've been referring to it often. It's growing daily, and there are tons upon tons of great things there, not just for primary sources, for ALL the Common Core.
• Evaluating Sources : Another pdf document, this one is helpful and I think your smarter 5th graders could handle without too many problems.

Two Great YouTube Video Based Tools That Will Add Student Engagement To Your Lessons

Today I wanted to share a few neat video tools that I can see students and teachers really enjoying in the classroom. I found both of these tools on Free Technology For Teachers, and after playing around with them, decided that they were definitely both worth sharing.

First off, there's wireWAX. wireWAX is a cool YouTube annotation service that allows you to place interactive tags inside of YouTube videos. The best part is, whatever you tag to opens up within the video that's already playing, it doesn't take you to an outside website. I'm already working on one to share with my students during a history lesson, and I've found that it's really interactive and engaging, I think students will really enjoy this.

Here is a wireWAX annotated video to check out:




Next up is blubbr. blubbr allows you to create YouTube video clip quizzes. After playing around with this one, I was very impressed, and see great applications on both computers and tablets alike. If the concept sounds interesting, I recommend you head there and try a few quizzes, and try to make your own. It's really easy, and like wireWAX, totally free.

Well, that's my quick little post for now. Go check out these two great services, you won't be disappointed!

Class Dojo: An Interactive and Fun Way to Monitor and Reinforce Behavior

Ask almost any teacher what their primary growth area is, and in what area they primarily have issues in, and if they're being honest, they'll most likely say behavior. How do you handle 21-35 kids all at the same time? It's not easy. It's not easy to deal with negative behaviors in a constructive way,

and it's really not easy to notice those students who are doing the right thing, and reinforce the positives. I'll admit, I've struggled with it over the years, and have tried multiple approaches to behavior management.

I feel as if I've been successful, but there's always room for growth. For the last few years, my school has been using the clip chart system of behavior monitoring and reinforcement. It's a simple concept, students start everyday at the green "ready to learn" spot, and can be moved up for positive behavior, and down for negatives.

There are consequences plainly spelled out for moving down, and the teacher can have different rewards for moving up (the graphic shows what this looks like).

I am fully on board for using the clip chart, and have found success with it, even in the 5th grade. BUT, there's always room for growth. I've also noticed from observation that many teachers don't properly utilize (or utilize at all) the clip chart, and this lack of follow through can create issues in a school, where everyone should be using the same method.

OK, anyways, that's not really what I wanted to get in to today. I wanted to show you a great behavior management system that's online, is easy to use, and is just all around fun. And yes, you can use it on a computer or a tablet.

Class Dojo is a neat behavior management software that you can project in your classroom, using a computer, an iPad/iPod/iPod Touch, an Android smartphone, and any other tablet you can imagine (more or less).

Each student has their own avatar, and by clicking on it, you can assign points or remove points. All of this is tracked, and you can view data at the end of each day showing how students are doing. This is easily readable and can be shared with parents either by printing it, or by having parents sign up for their own parent account to view their child's behavior.

I find Class Dojo to be interesting in that it's so transparent. You simply project it, assign points, and students get immediate feedback. It's also a great way of staying accountable (I know that's hard sometimes).

I've used a behavior notebook in the past, logging times I've had to discipline children, just for administrative purposes. Class Dojo takes care of that by keeping all the data together for each child.

Now, I know what you're asking. Yes, it's completely free, at least for right now. So go ahead and sign up, and get to using it. It's very user friendly, and there are tutorials if you're ever confused.

Finally, I'm embedding a few videos to get you started if you're interested in seeing more before you sign up:

Class Dojo Tutorial Video (11 minutes)

Using Class Dojo (4 minutes)

The Zone of Proximal Development and the Common Core: Teaching the Child, Not the Standard (Sort of)

This morning I wanted to talk about the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and the Common Core (CCSS). If you're not aware of the ZPD, go read up at simplepsychology.org or this definition with visual. To paraphrase, the ZPD talks about scaffolding learning, and that at any given point, we have present knowledge, the next level of knowledge, and beyond. Knowledge that cannot yet be obtained because it lies to far outside that scaffolding is called the distal zone. For example, you can't teach a 1st grader trigonometry because there's so much knowledge to obtain between now and then, so trigonometric functions will stay in the distal zone for some time (longer for some than others).

The great thing about the CCSS is that the tools are right there for teachers to ensure that every child is learning in their ZPD.

In the excerpt from RL.1, taken directly from the Common Core Standards ELA document, a 5th grade student is expected to "Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text." Well, guess what? Not every kid in your class will be able to do that, ESPECIALLY in the first years of the Common Core. So what do you do if that child isn't in their ZPD? Go back to 4th grade. It says ""refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text." If that doesn't fit the bill, keep moving backwards. This work will be integral in the initial years of the CCSS. Of course, we want each student mastering the 5th grade standard by the end of the year, but it's much clearer in the CCSS how everything scaffolds, and how the level of complexity picks up from one year to the next.

Now, when doing a read aloud (which, honestly, is a part of EVERY classroom, a major part, as it should be), it's important to know how this fits the CCSS. Let's not get into the mindset that the CCSS kills reading literature for pleasure, it seeks to balance the reading of literature and informational texts, and reading for pleasure, as most any teacher knows, is very important to student success and is an indicator of future success in the literacy classroom. 

First off, you have to know the standards. You have to know when you're touching on those standards, and giving students practice, because after all, writing is equally important as reading in the CCSS (and it really is, you can't argue that). By knowing the standards by heart, you'll know what areas to focus on, where to stop and have book discussions, and when to assign deep writing assignments based on the read aloud.

William and Pérsida Himmele, in their article Why Read Alouds Matter More in the Age of the Common Core Standards, say:

In light of this radical shift away from our current lopsided emphasis on narrative texts, protecting the read-aloud time may seem counterintuitive. After all, why would we want to use up valuable instructional time reading stories to our students? Our answer is simple. In addition to getting kids hooked on books, narrative read-alouds are an effortless way to help students acquire the academic language they will need to comprehend informational texts.

When we give up the read-aloud, we may slow students' vocabulary learning; research has shown a strong positive correlation between read-aloud experiences and vocabulary development (Meehan, 1999; Roberts, 2008; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002; Sharif, Ozuah, Dinkevich, & Mulvihill, 2003). A 20-minute read-aloud can repeatedly expose children to academic words that will likely show up in content textbooks. For example, such words as somber, bespoke, probed, tolerance, substance, boring, searing, eliciting, surges, and anguish are considered academic vocabulary. And they all appear in this paragraph from Brandon Mull's book, Beyonders: Seeds of Rebellion, marketed for 3rd to 6th graders. In this excerpt, a character named Nedwin describes his torture at the hands of the captors who placed him under the influence of a pain-enhancing substance.

Exposure to academic words, and exposure to advanced ideas are important components of the read aloud. As you push more and more through the CCSS, you'll learn that exposure is key, you need to constantly expose students to these ideas and to shift their thinking to a deeper level. It will be a challenge in the initial years as we see the glaring gaps between the CCSS and our old state standards, but that's ok, this is about college readiness and future success, and we have to start somewhere.

WORKS CITED

Himmele, William and Himmele, Pérsida, (December 6, 2012). Why Read-Alouds Matter More in the Age of the Common Core Standards. ASCD Express. 8 (5).

Meehan, M. L. (1999). Evaluation of the Monomgalia County schools' Even Start program child vocabulary outcomes. Charleston, WV: AEL.

Roberts, T. (2008). Home storybook reading in primary or second language preschool children: Evidence of equal effectiveness for second language vocabulary acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 103–130.

Sénéchal, M., & LeFevre, J. A. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children's reading skill: A five year longitudinal study. Child Development, 73(2), 445–460.

Sharif, I., Ozuah, P. O., Dinkevich, E. I., & Mulvihill, M. (2003). Impact of a brief literacy intervention on urban preschoolers. Early Childhood Education Journal, 30(3), 177–180.