When I tried to write my “math autobiography” before, it didn’t go well. Looking at the past, I am not sure how I felt about the subject and what experiences made me abandon it for almost twenty year. I was born in USSR, Kazan, and started my education in German bilingual school. I was obsessed with academic performance: I remember having a complete meltdown when I got A instead of A+ in German in grade 2. I also remember I loved math in elementary, but I am not sure if it’s because I loved the subject or really liked the teacher. So I eventually got the reference to the Junior High Mathematic ..read more

Trouble with Triangles 1 Questions to consider before reading further. What is the perimeter of a triangle with the side lengths of 6.4, 2.9, 3.3 units? Make as many triangles as you can with a perimeter of 12 units (integer value sides). Yes, the first is actually an impossible triangle and the second question doesn’t have as many solutions as many elementary students believe it does. I have asked the second question in multiple  grade 3-6 classrooms this year. So far, there was one student who was able to immediately identify that 10-1-1 triangle is impossible. Triangle inequality the ..read more

I am trying to de-unitize my grade 5 math curriculum this year. As we are reviewing subtraction, looking at visual patterns and exploring arrays, we also work on building vocabulary and precision in describing and classifying shapes. We started with a Which One Does Not Belong? board which is the permanent setup now in our hallway with regularly changing prompts. Rope Polygons: Body-Scale Exploration Last Friday, I decided to implement a Rope Polygons lesson from Whole-Body Math Lessons developed by Malke Rosenfeld. I was hoping that my students will have an opportunity to refine their unders ..read more

I have been excited and anxious about this September. It is my first year teaching grade 5. I am not sharing a room with another teacher this year, and I now teach all subjects like all elementary generalists are supposed to do. I spend less time teaching math, or rather I try to spend less time teaching math. Recommended time allocation is 25% for Language Arts and 15% for math. Can I add math journaling to 25%? I spent a large part of my summer getting my head around grade 5 topics and outcomes and trying to plan. My google drive notes progressed from “Grade 5 Math Miscellaneous” to “Math We ..read more

This post was supposed to happen after the school year was over.  At the end of the year, we spent the last 3 weeks talking about fractions, my favorite topic in grade 3 curriculum. I knew I needed something to keep me going in June.  Then the summer started. My memories are hazy now, but I’ll give it a try. Here are the highlights in (to my best recollection) chronological order. The Cookie Fiasco The Cookie Fiasco is a wonderful funny book in which four friends are trying to share three cookies. We read the first half, stopped and I asked my students to help the friends with the co ..read more

The end of the school year is usually an emotional time for me for a multitude of reasons: some students who I never reached, some personal goals unaccomplished, curriculum not covered, rushed lessons, unfinished conversations, the workload doesn’t fit into 24 hours day and “my kids” are about to disappear into the summer. So this post is not about a lesson or a series of lessons, it’s about emotions and perceptions. Introduction As the school year is coming to an end, so is our Mount Holyoke College Course. During the most recent session with Kaneka Turner, she shared her call to action with ..read more

There has been a lot of conversations about disciplinary literacy in recent months in my  professional learning circles. The intent is sometimes going in strange directions in math class towards keywords in word problems and being “ok with writing just to write”.  The whole “incorporating reading and writing into the math class” treats the matter as if reading and writing skills are somehow not intrinsic to math and have to be dragged in forcefully. There is a lot of reading, writing, questioning, inquiring and thinking critically that absolutely has to happen in a math class for stu ..read more

Look at your hands and your fingers, 1 to 5 on one hand and 6 to 10 on another. Doesn’t it look like 5 might be closer to 0? It wasn’t anything I contemplated recently until my students brought it up during Open Middle/Clothesline math session. Make a number that is closer to 200 than 300. Where is 250? “I think, it is closer to 200, because you count 250 first.” “Because a teacher told if it’s 50, you round down.” This made me pause, “What about numbers from 0 to 10, Is 5 closer to 0 or to 10?” “Closer to zero.” “Raise your hand, if you think it’s closer to 0.” – More than half of the hands g ..read more

Introduction “What is a pattern?” – “It is when something is repeating like ABAB.” I found at the beginning of grade 3 that my students could build repeating patterns. We’ve been working throughout the year on identifying rules in increasing and decreasing numerical and visual patterns, and I wanted to find a way for all this scattered practice to come together. The credit for the idea goes, yet again, to Simon Gregg  who shared how he used Desmos with his students to graph the visual patterns they created. He shared his blog post with the details of the lesson and students’ work. I wante ..read more

Introduction When I started teaching grade 3 last year, I printed out the Program of Study and went over it with three different colors highlighters. One for the concepts introduced or explored deeper in grade 3, one for the numeracy skills my students need to master (e.g. subtraction of three-digit numbers), and one for applications (measurement, data analysis and representation). Oftentimes, I intentionally integrate my “applied math” lessons with other subjects, sometimes the need to measure something arises in a context. I try to be sensitive to these contexts to catch the teachable moment ..read more