GECDSB School Based Learning Sessions (SBL)
Wednesday January 11th, 2017
Thanks for inviting me to learn with you on your school based learning day! The group was energetic and excited to learn about meaningful manipulative use, spatial reasoning, concreteness fading and 3 act math tasks.
Here’s a summary of what we explored today:
The GECDSB Mathematics Strategy
Mathematical Proficiencies
The full GECDSB Mathematics Vision is here.
Cookie Monster – 3 Act Math Task
We did Graham Fletcher’s Cookie Monster 3 Act Math Task as a warm-up.
Access his resource page here.
Making Math Contextual, Visual and Concrete
As I mentioned, I have been on a quest to make math contextual, visual and concrete. To learn more about how I use 3 act math tasks as a means to spark student curiosity as we introduce new learning goals, read my post about the 4-part math lesson.
The Pedagogical System
We then discussed the Pedagogical System as a way to summarize effective mathematics instruction. Placemats were passed out and participants took some time to think about and discuss where these elements could be found in the Cookie Monster Task.
Using Manipulatives as a Tool for Understanding Place Value
We briefly viewed two student interview videos by Marilyn Burns to show how manipulatives can be very important to assess student understanding.
See these videos and others here.
We then explored the progression of multiplication. For a full summary, see the post below.
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Concreteness Fading
We attempted to summarize the use of manipulatives on a continuum called “Concreteness Fading”. While the name suggests that concrete manipulatives fade away over time, it is important to remember that they fade away with one layer of abstraction and then reappear as a new layer is “piled” on.
Hope you folks found this professional learning experience useful. I’d be delighted to come back and learn alongside you all again sometime soon!