A former student's mom voiced some frustration to me on Friday regarding teachers and homework. She was frustrated that her child was getting unfinished work sent home that even she couldn't help with. It is crazy how much the curriculum has changed since we were in school and parents often get just as frustrated as their students do when trying to help. I want to use this blog to show you, as parents, what we are doing in the classroom in hopes it will help you work with your child at home. I know we do not send home math homework in first grade but that doesn't mean that we can't practice it at home, right?
This is my first time attempting something like this so bear with me while I work out the wrinkles. My idea is to post videos that I find and/or videos of your children working with different strategies that we are currently using in class. These could be reading strategies, comprehension strategies or something math related.
My first video is an example of how we introduce addition to our first graders. We use a part-part-whole model as seen below.
This is my first time attempting something like this so bear with me while I work out the wrinkles. My idea is to post videos that I find and/or videos of your children working with different strategies that we are currently using in class. These could be reading strategies, comprehension strategies or something math related.
My first video is an example of how we introduce addition to our first graders. We use a part-part-whole model as seen below.
Next week we will be flipping this model upside down and using it to help introduce subtraction.
This model also helps us to later introduce that addition and subtraction are inverse operations and can be used to find missing number problems as well.
We teach the children to listen to the word problem and pick out the "number parts". They also must listen to see if the problem is "joining parts" or "taking parts away". The last few weeks we have only been working on "joining parts". The video below is an independent station that the students do to practice "joining the parts". The young lady is rolling a die to give her the two parts in her problem. She is using counters and a plastic plate with dividers in it to help give a visual for the part part whole model. She is also using a white board so that she starts to practice writing the numbers in the problem. Next week we will use this model to show how you use these numbers to make an addition sentence.
This model also helps us to later introduce that addition and subtraction are inverse operations and can be used to find missing number problems as well.
We teach the children to listen to the word problem and pick out the "number parts". They also must listen to see if the problem is "joining parts" or "taking parts away". The last few weeks we have only been working on "joining parts". The video below is an independent station that the students do to practice "joining the parts". The young lady is rolling a die to give her the two parts in her problem. She is using counters and a plastic plate with dividers in it to help give a visual for the part part whole model. She is also using a white board so that she starts to practice writing the numbers in the problem. Next week we will use this model to show how you use these numbers to make an addition sentence.
I hope this blog and the ones to come help everyone at home. Let me know if you think this is something you would use or if you have any other things you would like me to post on here.