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Welcome to my math blog! The purpose of this blog is to help you stay informed about our learning and experiences that have taken place during our math class. I have also included links your child (and you) may want to use in order to supplement math learning in 5th grade.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Khan Academy/Fifth Grade Builder

Bell Ringer:


Today's bell ringer comes from 101 Questions.  I use this site once a week as a warm up activity.  I post a picture on the screen and ask my students to write the first MATH question that comes to mind.  I use Google Classroom for students to submit their questions.  This allows me to showcase everyone's questions, but also help my students to correct their work and get ideas from other students.

Since this was our first attempt, many of my students questions were pretty basic, however, I had a few that exceeded my expectations.  My favorite actually wrote me a word problem:


A man ordered fries, lemons, and pickles at a restaurant.  The fries were $3.50, the pickles were a dollar, and the lemons were 50 cents.  How much money did he make in all?

Good Things

As usual, I spent about 5 minutes allowing students to share the "good things" that are happening to them.  I do this with every class to ensure that I get to learn about my students.  One of the best parts of my day!

Lesson Frame
  • We will learn about our use of Khan Academy this year including earning rewards as we work and how to use Khan Academy as a resource when working through TTM.
  • I will explain how purposefully using Khan Academy can help me while I work on Think Through Math.
Lesson

We began the lesson by ensuring that the students all had a working bookmark to Khan. Then I had them join my Khan classroom. Khan has made changes over the summer, so we had to work through some of the setup together. Once that was taken care of, we discussed the ways that we could use Khan to enhance our learning with Think Through Math and walked through the rewards available as students earn Khan skills:


Before allowing students some time to explore and work with Khan, it was time to begin working on our first math assignment.  I had heard about a book series called "Algebra Readiness Builders," that was able to close some of the gaps that hinder students ability to understand algebra.  I decided to use the first "builder" today.  I actually broke the page in 1/2.  The top half was complete review, but the bottom half was introducing some new concepts.   I chose to work the problems on the bottom half with my students so that I could model for them.


I do not like to assign math for homework, so I set apart at least 20 minutes a day to work on that day's assignment.  I also like to give my students immediate feedback, as well as being able to see immediately what concepts are causing problems.  To do this, I require students to solve a single problem at a time and bring their paper to me to check.  If it is correct, they get a check mark.  If it is incorrect, I circle the problem number and either give guidance as to where the error occurred or ask the students to look more closely at their work.  This process also ensures that students either completely finish their work in class, or have only a few problems to complete at home.

I must say, while these problems were intended to be review, I certainly found some areas that I need to work on with my kids!

Once students had finished the assignment, they were able to get onto Khan for a few minutes.

Close

To close the lesson, I had students talk with their table group.  They needed to explain how purposefully using Khan Academy can help them while working on Think Through Math.

After a few minutes of discussion, one student from each group needed to report their decision to the class. All of the groups concurred. If someone is stuck on a topic in TTM, they can open a new tab to Khan, search the topic, watch the video, and solve the problems to help gain an understanding!

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