Casey Droste Student Blog 2.19

My placement did not have school today so I grabbed a picture of a worksheet I found in their room last week.  I was not present for the specific worksheet but I believe it was put in place to test where students were on understanding the division of fractions.  We have not talked about this yet in our class so I assume this was a pretest before the lesson.  A pretest is helpful to the teacher to be able to see what is the most confusing part about this topic and what she can point out to help them through this lesson.  I believe they must have had some previous exposure to this in earlier grades or lessons but we have not specifically taught this idea yet in the classroom.

I grabbed the work of one student who seems to struggle in school, he is distracted and likes to goof around a lot.  I know this student can pay attention and do well in his course when he puts his mind to it but there are certain classmates that get him off task very fast and it is hard to bring him back.  Since this was a pretest it was individual and very quiet.  The pretests are taken in the homerooms for 6^th grade, not in the normal math classroom so I am thinking he feels more comfortable and at ease in his own classroom and his teacher knows how to deal with the distractions he has quite well.  This student understood this concept extremely well.  This task was not very high level but the repetition shows that he understands you just have to flip the second fraction and then multiply them to get the answer when dividing.  This shows he can do this and that he can do the simple math that is involved here.

Fraction word problems have always been confusing to me so I am not sure I can explain what I am thinking here very well.  I think a way to take this to a deeper level would to make a word problem in which the fractions are in words and it is a division problem, then this would help us see that the student understands what the fraction is, understands it is a division problem and then also knows that they need to flip the fraction and multiply.  Even this seems pretty much just mathematics so taking it a step further and ask students to create their own word problem for division with fractions (something I cannot even do) and have them solve it.  They could have these shared throughout the class and the other classmates would have to solve them.