Where I'm AT

Today was a tough day of teaching, but I learned from my mistakes.

My math lesson didn't go as planned. I tried to anticipate things, but until you actually teach some lessons, you just don't know how the kids will respond. Today I learned that you have to be very explicit when giving directions to 4th graders.

Some of them don't know how to work in groups or to work cooperatively with one another, others do. The in-class assignment was to work in your group to measure one wall of the classroom and then to confer with another group that also measured that wall as well to see how close their measurements were. We would meet back together after the kids had an opportunity to measure their wall and all report what we learned before drawing a scale drawing of our corporate findings in our Math Journals.

You have to tell them that they can measure the floor length and width instead of trying to strain to reach the walls. They are very literal.

They have to be told they can use the floor tiles as an assisting measurement device because the tiles are a foot long each.

They have to be reminded that the measuring sticks are meter sticks, not yard sticks and that if they decide to measure in inches or yards they will have to convert the distance to feet because our scale is 1/4 inch on the grid paper to each actual foot that they measure.

They need to be told the exact procedure for deciding how to break up the wall they are assigned to measure, to record the length or width in feet and inches and which group to confer with when they are done to make sure their results are accurate. You may even have to break the room up into sections and assigned each group member a section to measure, or assign each group a section to measure.

Tell the groups that have the walls with the windows or the doors, they need to measure the door or windows themselves and the how to account for the distance between the windows on their grids. You should also address this with the group so when they go to make the drawing, it is accurately reflected in their scale drawing.

You should have a scale drawing of the room set up on an overhead grid so that each group can report back to you and you have a completed illustration to show the group, so that they will know what elements you expect to see on their own grids.

When each group is done measuring...get each group's estimates of their assigned walls and find the median of each set of measurements. Pick whole numbers. Decide how much of the grid paper you will actually need by asking students to compare the length and width of the room, with the actual number of squares you have in the length and width of the grid paper. Our grid paper was 25 x 30 and we only needed 20 x 30. Some students didn't note this on their grids and used the whole paper. Others didn't pay attention when I later noted that they needed to pay attention to the way the sample rough drawing and scale drawing looked in the opposite Math Journal page. They needed to make sure theirs looked like the one in the journal and needed to include similar markings as the one in the journal: i.e. measurements, drawings representing the door and windows, arrows along the side accompanying the measurements in feet.

I have to reteach this one tomorrow to get adequate results from my students. They're not going to like that very well...but live and learn!