The power of sharing, collaborating and giving credit where it’s due!
This post is because of Joe Schwartz sharing his awesomeness at Exit 10A. Joe got the idea from Nicora Placa‘s post on tape modeling. She cites 3 sources in her post which are probably 3 of the one million books and articles she reads each year. I watched Nicora share her expertise at the Global Math Department when she presented Draw A Picture: Using Diagrams To Make Sense Of Word Problems. Nicora…glad you’re back in the saddle, well rested, and sharing again!
I think 99% of teachers will agree that division may be one of the most difficult things to teach. Not anymore!
Click Here To Change Your Life Forever Thanks to the Placa-Schwartz Mash Up
I have shared this with a lot of teachers through workshops and by adding it into the Georgia Frameworks. Because of that, these math innovators must be given credit for the transformation currently taking place.
Sure I could have tweeted this out but there’s no way I could have said thank you in 140 characters. Thank you Joe and Nicora!
Now…go to Joe’s and Nicora’s blog and tell them thank you yourself!
Thanks Brian for the kind words and great to see you at GCTM last week!
You’ve shared such a great idea Brian! I’ll be diving into division next week at a school and the model of removing beans through the scoop is such a great visual for students to contextually see and connect to the idea of repeated subtraction!
I think it would be great for you to type this up and share or post about it on your blog. Ideas like this need to be shared. Just sayin’!
Graham
Great seeing you at the DOE the last two days, Graham! I’ve very much enjoyed reading your blog!
I recently used tape diagrams in a problem-based context with 5th graders. Got part of the idea from a Marilyn Burns book: basically showed the students a small cylindrical glass and asked them to predict how many scoops of kidney beans it would take to fill the glass. After soliciting a wide range of estimates, I put 3 scoops of beans in the glass, which filled it about halfway (which resulted in a cacophony of “Aw, man!” from the class). I then allowed the students to revise their initial estimates (which were much more reasonable this time!). Then, I filled the glass completely (which took 7 scoops). I then posed the following problem:
The glass holds 203 beans. How many beans does each scoop hold?
From there, we used tape diagrams to investigate with various partial quotients and only one kid in the entire class even tried to use the standard division algorithm to solve the problem (even though they were all aware of it and perhaps “proficient” with the procedure). I’ll never know for sure, but my intuition tells me that the problem-based context might have had an influence on this.
Thanks for the inspiring ideas, man — keep them coming!
Seriously…thank you for this post! It came at a perfect moment…right when I was asking myself, “How in the world do these kids not get it??” I have tried every method I know to help. You offered a life line. Thank YOU!!! ( And I will be thanking Joe and Nicora as well) 🙂
Life lines are great!!! All of us are smarter than one of us. Be sure to blog about how it goes with your students. Love the inoculation of conceptual understanding happening in GA!