Students are included in this group based on instructional needs. The classroom teachers and myself continually reassess which students are most likely to benefit from this challenge curriculum. Students will join and leave the group throughout the year.
I will be working with high performing students two days a week in a math pull-out class for about 55 minutes. This extension class challenges students to develop strong conceptual understanding and clearly communicate mathematical thinking. Our first unit, The Mystery of the Moli Stone, looks at the structures and protocols of place value systems. By the end of this unit, students will be able to count in base three (or other bases).
Students are included in this group based on instructional needs. The classroom teachers and myself continually reassess which students are most likely to benefit from this challenge curriculum. Students will join and leave the group throughout the year.
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Students have been constructing and investigating lever systems. Using spring scales they have measured the force required to lift an object as the load is repositioned at varying distances from the fulcrum. After graphing the results, they clearly saw the "magic" of levers.
The next third grade rotation will start on Tuesday January 17th. The focus will be scientific experiments. We will be measuring the advantage ( in Newtons ) gained by simple machines.
The current focus is learning to get "unstuck" without any math help from the teacher. Additonally, we are still learning how to write "an X-ray few of our thinking as we solved the problem.
For the next two weeks, third graders will be focusing on mathematical problem solving and mathematical communication. This pull-out program occurs Monday - Wednesday for about an hour each day.
The biggest challenge for most students is to recognize the need to start over when their first strategy fails (persistence). Is my child participating in any gifted ed programs? This is the question I am getting most often. In third grade, the current program is a pull-out math session three days a week. This occurs during CE time. There are two rotating groups of about two weeks each. If I am not working with your child now, I might be in a few weeks. The program may change as the year progresses.
How are students selected? The grade level teams work with me to identify students that are ready for this extension. We continually evaluate student performance and adjust the groups to meet student needs. Actually, it is a bit more complex than that. The third grade classes are participating every cycle. The multi-age classrooms are divided into two two week cycles. Students have been learning about the Roman number system. More importantly, they have been learning "without a teacher." This encourages the development of independent learning skills and self-reliance.
Third graders answered this question:
...because people are curious and want to know stuff, math helps them understand ....cavemen invented math to tell how many mammoth tusks they had to trade ......so that cavemen could plan their hunting trips .....so that cavemen could plan their wars Coming Soon: 24 Tournament at Hollymead Elementary
April 27 6:00 pm Information went home last week. Students have been practicing and final teams will be determined this week. Students are welcome to attend practice sessions even it they are not trying out for the team. |
AuthorSteve Gissendanner Archives
October 2018
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