Friday, September 23, 2016

Internship Week 5

I decided to start the week with renewing my mindset. I've learned that dwelling on negative thoughts, will keep me in that mindset and that is not a mindset I will allow myself to stay in, for very long.
We get one life to live and since I don't live in a tent in the woods, my interactions with others will be affected by thoughts I allow to "camp out" in my mind. Not happening! Each day is a new day! A new beginning! :)


This week was a great week. My goal this week was to try and come up with resources that I could use with students that are struggling to learn certain math concepts. We have been working on numbers that come before and after a given number. I graded a math quick check that was given to students and saw that approximately six students struggle with consistently finding the before/after number of a given number. I was able to figure out that part of the issue is the 100’s board they are using. Students are getting confused when you go from left to right (i.e. 1-10), then you go back to the left and down a row to get to the next number (11). For example, if the given number was 11(which would be the 1st number on the second row), some of the students would get stuck immediately and say the number before 11 is 13, instead of going up a row and looking to the far right. For this reason, I had the idea to create a number line for students to get a better visual as to what is before and after. I created three number lines (1-20, 21-40, and 41-60). This seemed to have helped some of the students; I was excited about that. 

Another strategy we tried was putting a Unifix cube on the given number- this seemed to help some, as they weren’t taking their finger off to write down their answer. The cube stayed put, so it helped keep their place after they wrote down the first part of before/after. Even with all going on with the edTPA, this was a great week! Sometimes it takes a lot of things happening at once, to make me realize I need to just take a step back, reflect, and breathe.