Monday, February 11, 2013

Student Work


This is a warm up worksheet the students worked on one morning. This is the overhead version of it. My MT had the students work on it individually and then called on students to answer the questions. I think it was helpful for the students to give them time to work through it on their own, and then work through it as a whole class with my MT. The word problems did give the students the numbers to work with, however they made the students come up with how to solve the problem. The problem of the day says that a person is painting "HAVE A GREAT DAY" on a shirt. It takes the person ten minutes to paint each letter. Will they be able to complete the shirt in 2 hours. Many of the students had trouble with this and just wanted to add the letters together and say that the person had enough time. Once they worked as a group, they saw that one must multiply 10 by 13 to get 130 and that the person will not have enough time. I like this problem as it involves multiplication and deals with time. 

The last question is just a multiplication question. It says that there are 23 students in a class and a teacher uses 20 sheets per student a week, how many sheets of paper are used in the week? That was the simple part of the question, but my MT expanded it and once they solved the problem she expanded it to real world. She told the students that she has 1700 sheets of paper per month, on average she uses 20 sheets of paper and has 23 students. This was a gradual process but the students really enjoyed working through it as it was about them. She then talked to them about the fact that she does not even have enough paper to give each student their own a week, and that is why it is important to not lose them. I thought that was a nice little detail. 

The students did not have much trouble with the multiplication aspect of this, but they did have trouble figuring out that they had to multiply.The students had trouble figuring out what to do with the numbers in a word problem. I have noticed this is where they always struggle. I think it would be helpful if we worked with the students about organizing their work before they begin solving it. If we helped the students see how simply writing 13 letters and 10 minutes per each on their paper, it would help them solve the problem much faster! I also think that it would be helpful if we gave the students more word problems, but made them more real to them. We could bring in blocks, or objects that the problem dealt with. It would help them visualize what they are doing. 

1 comment:

  1. What are some different ways to represent the mathematical concepts this problem is asking students to engage with? What are the connections between those representations? How might we open up this task (make is more cognitively demanding) in order to invite those different representations?

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