Sarah OConnor TIE 535: TPA November 9th , 2012

I am currently a resident in a first grade classroom at Tarkington School of Excellence on the southwest side of Chicago. This clip contains portions of a supplemental pennies and nickels lesson aimed to reinforce strategies of counting by 5s and 1s to compute mixed coin values. The student friendly objective for the lesson is Students will be able to figure out the value of a group of pennies and nickels by counting coins by 1s and 5s. This aligns with Common Core Standard 7.A.1c: Identify and describe the relative values and relationships among coins and solve addition (and subtraction) problems using currency. 1. In the instruction seen in the clip(s), describe strategies you used to engage students in learning tasks to develop skills and strategies to comprehend or compose text. a. Cite examples of strategies aimed at engaging all your students and examples aimed at engaging specific individuals or subgroups. If you described any of these fully in the lesson plans or the planning commentary, just reference the relevant description. I created a math lesson around nickels and pennies, creating a game aura around the active engagement, or we do, portion of the lesson. By presenting the learning on the carpet as a game, students were more engaged from the start. This also helped them to focus their attention, as they wanted to learn how to play the new game. I gave students many opportunities to participate in the lesson, even if they are only passively putting a thumb up or thumb down. Through their identification of the coins (by putting their hand on their hand or their hand on their throat), students remained engaged and I was able to quickly survey the room and identify students who were not able to identify the coins. Using cold call throughout the lesson allowed my students to hear the correct answer multiple times, and it gave lower students a chance to hear the thinking and understanding of more advanced math thinkers. I had students repeat answers two or three times by cold calling various students, and then had the class repeat as a whole. This repetition helps the students retain information more effectively, and to recall whole group strategies while working alone. All students acknowledged themselves as accountable, and they worked to help others in the class succeed (many students can be heard whispering answers to others who are unsure). b. How did these strategies reflect students academic or language development, social/emotional development, or cultural and lived experiences? Cold call allows my students to take responsibility and a sense of accountability for their own learning. The scaffolded cold call that I used in this clip helped students to use their peers as a basis for knowledge. Students were able to listen to correct peer thinking, and model that thinking simultaneously (ex. When student states I was listening to you and I put the number in my head so I could remember.). The language used in this clip supports the mathematical language development of the students. They understand counting by 5s, and so the transference of that skill needed a small amount of prompting, but was clear for them.

2. Cite examples of language supports seen in the clip(s) to help your students understand that content and/or participate in literacy discourse central to the lesson. a. How did these strategies reflect students varying language proficiencies and promote their language development? Tarkington has a large community of Hispanic students, and my class is about 60% Hispanic. Although there are no English Language Learners, many of my students parents only speak Spanish, and it can be more difficult for them to voice their thinking due to a less robust vocabulary. With these students, I model clear thinking while trying to pronounce my words and speak explicitly. I have found that explicit directions and a clear speaking voice allows them to understand and differentiate between the words in my sentence. These skills help them with a deeper understanding of math, but generally are most effective while doing shared reading or writing in a whole class setting. Specifically in this lesson, new concepts taught were counting mixed coins, and counting on. The definitions of pennies and nickels were reviewed at the beginning of the lesson and repeated by students. This allowed students to model the language of others if necessary. In addition, students were prompted to provide the word cents after their answers, as a penny is not worth one, it is worth one cent. This language is essential when dealing with coins in math. 3. Describe strategies for eliciting student thinking and how your ongoing responses further their learning. Cite examples from the clip(s). Much of the evidence of student thinking in this clip derives from students ability to count by 5s and switch to counting by 1s. By using a gradual release model, I go from modeling the counting for the students to counting with them, and finally allowing other students to lead the game. Frequent checks for understanding, such as When we get to the end of the nickels, why do we clap? and Do we clap after every coin? Why not? Why do we not clap after every coin? allow students to process the why behind the strategies they will ultimately employ in this and subsequent coin lessons. I prompted students to explain their thinking to peers and myself, asking How do you know? This question can be incredibly telling, especially with first graders. Sometimes their answers are a lucky guess, or they solved their problems in an incorrect way but managed to come up with the same answer. In opportunities such as these, modeling correct math thinking allows students to model that language and that thinking in math lessons. 4. Reflection a. Reflect on students learning of concepts and academic language as featured in the video clip(s). Identify both successes and missed opportunities for monitoring all students learning and for building their own understanding of skills and strategies for comprehending and/or composing text.

On the carpet, students were generally engaged and on task. Because this lesson was a supplemental lesson on nickels and pennies, students had already been taught what nickels and pennies were and the value of each of the coins. Counting the coins while mixed together was a new concept for students, and judging both by their responses on the carpet and their independent work and exit slips, most students in the class grasped the work and were able to perform independently. Two students even used the strategy of writing down the number on their work over the coins to keep track of their counting on. I found it to be difficult to monitor the whole group during the scaffolding of the You Do portion of the lesson. The ELMO stopped working, and monitoring learning and on task behavior is difficult for me at that time. I plan to use this knowledge as a foundation for building tighter transitions within the math lesson, and perhaps new habits for the class to form about whole group work to increase learning time. b. If you could do it over, what might you have done to take advantage of missed opportunities or to improve the learning of students with diverse learning needs and characteristics? I would love to differentiate this lesson if I were to do it again based on students that had a general knowledge of the value of the coins and knew how to count them together. Based around the supplemental independent work, there were four students in the class who were able to complete a higher order math skill (mixed pennies and nickels) and compute their value without any teacher direction. Those students should have been working with higher values and mixed coins the whole time independently, after the counting up skill was taught on the carpet. I would also like to keep a group on the carpet to reteach the concept that struggled, before going to independent work. I was able to pull a small group based on the result of the exit slips, but I believe re-teaching is more effective the sooner it happens. I want my students practicing skills in the correct way. This re-teaching could also have served as an additional scaffold into independent work whereas other students could have begun working without teacher assistance.