Kevin's Personal Learning Path

 Hello! Welcome to Week 3 of my blog entry.  Tonight, I reviewed how to "make new units" using place values.  In 4th Grade, it appears that exploring the relationships which exist between numbers is a big emphasis.  Students must understand that a dime is equal to 10 pennies, and a a dollar is equal to 10 dimes.  The homework I assigned my students includes two word problems which encourage them to use multiplication skills and place values to decode units of numbers.  For example, the below word problem states that since 1 dollar is worth 10 times as much as 1 dime, then 5 dollars must be worth 5 times as much as 5 dimes. In actuality, 5 times 5 dimes is half the amount of 5 dollars. One would need 50 dimes in order to have an amount equal to 5 dollars.  Students review 3rd Grade math asking for the area of a garden with a length of 7ft and a width of 6ft.  As 4th Grade teachers, it's important when asking these questions to encourage that studen...

Good evening! Welcome to the second entry of my Personal Learning Path! Today is Tuesday, September 12th and we are almost one week into our new school year in my district. Continuing my journey of rediscovering my love for math by tracking my classroom's process of learning Fourth Grade math, today I will be sharing the homework my students were assigned to complete -- only instead of showing my students work, I will be sharing my own! Yes, I am going to complete the homework I am assigning my students so I can review (and in some cases relearn) the fourth grade math curriculum.  This week, our students are digging into learning the relationship between multiplication and division. When we multiply, we are completing the opposite operation of division and vice versa. Using tape diagrams, students were given a sentence... "36 is _____ times as many as 9." ...then an equation to solve... "_____ = _____ x 9." Students use their knowledge of multiplication to deter...

Good evening! Welcome to the first entry of my Personal Learning Path. Today is Tuesday, September 5th – the day before the first day of school in my district!  This year, I will be working with an amazing group of 4th Grade students. Reflecting on my time in elementary school, 4th Grade was when I was most challenged as a math student, but it was also when I felt most confident as a young mathematician!  Since then, I have never viewed myself as a “math guy,” but this year, I am hoping that will finally change! This is why I will be dedicating this term to rediscovering my love for math by tracking my classroom’s ongoing journey in the subject on my blog!  My goal here is to unearth new ways of framing math as a subject for students who – like me – either lost their confidence, or found it endlessly challenging. If math can be framed differently for those students so that they will be incentivized to problem solve, find the unknown, and maybe even view it as an art, then...