Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Charting in Math

The #1stchat group on Twitter has been reading Math Exchanges by Kassia Omonhundro Wedekind, (@kassiaowedekind). A recent discussion made me think about how we work to capture student thinking and use it to support learners in our classrooms. During our chat, I posted some charts from a recent geometry unit. Most of them were reference charts, used as a holding place for new information on plane and solid figures. Nice, but not really the daily working charts that move student thinking forward.

I took some new photos of our recent work. The Benchmark, MA.1.A.6.1 (Use mathematical reasoning and beginning understanding of tens and ones, including the use of invented strategies, to solve two-digit addition and subtraction problems) has lead to some great thinking from the students.


Chart with Benchmark
The challenge with charting is to record what the child says about how they solved the problem and represent it in a way that makes sense to the other students.

Math is taught in the workshop model of Launch (opening), Explore (work period) followed by the Summarize (closing). One can see from the various charts how we scaffold the closing, building from less mature to more efficient strategies. As time goes on the students are developing more mature strategies, relying less on counting on their fingers. Eventually they will have a bank of student-generated efficient strategies.

Chart with Student Generated Strategies

Decomposing Chart


Breaking Apart 8, 10, and 20


The student work, and the charts, grow and change over the unit. Charts are retired when they no longer reflects the new student learning. Our current work reflects the new strategies taught to the class by...the students! 

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