Guest Blog: Preventing the Summer Slide

We are thrilled to have one last guest blog for the 2012-2013 school year from Rayla Rucker, a dedicated 4th grade teacher at Pleasant Hill Elementary and math teacher leader! Other topics she blogged about were Transforming Math Homework and Transforming Math Instruction. This time, Rayla gave some inspiring and insightful advice to her students and parents on how to "Prevent the Summer Slide." Thank you, Rayla, for offering fellow educators, parents and students a chance to read this advice on how to keep learning happening throughout the summer in all subject areas-not just math!

Preventing the Summer Slide
Summer slide happens to kids that spend the summer having fun, but forgetting completely about school.  As parents, we have the best intentions, but I know from experience that giving a couple of weeks off can lead to an entire summer of stagnancy that results in low beginning of the year performance.  These kids have worked too hard this year to leave learning alone for two months.  

So, what is Mrs. Rucker’s prescription?  Make learning fun and stress free.  Even better, make them feel like they did not do any learning at all while enriching their Summer experience.

Here is a list of suggestions and links to cool websites.  The only slide we want is on a playscape or at a water park!

Language Arts:

Read, Read, Read, Think, Create

Keep a journal throughout the summer.  Record your thoughts, dreams, adventures, favorite parts of books or movies.  Keep your brain active through writing.

Read, Read, Read

Guys, reading is fun!  It is it’s own adventure. Don’t stop.  You owe it to yourselves, your present families, and your future families.

Great Places to Find The Latest and Greatest Books:

Mr. Shu is a librarian and he blogs about awesome books!

http://mrschureads.blogspot.com/   

Scholastic.com has great books at great prices!

http://www.scholastic.com/home/

Leander Public Library:  Find out about summer reading program and learn how to be a Library card carrying Texan!

http://leander.librarycatalog.info/polaris/

Math:

Find the math in the world all around you!

Seriously, ask your parents to redecorate your room...We are redecorating Chloe’s this summer.  You’d better believe she’s going to be figuring out the square footage of our walls and calculating the amount and cost of the paint we will be buying.  That’s as real as it gets!  

Do Your Own Number Talks

Lead your parents through them.  Don’t let them lead you.  :)  Let them see that there is more than one way.  Remember, they were taught to remember ONE WAY...isn’t that crazy.  :)

Excellent resource to prevent math slippage. 

http://www.nctm.org/resources/content.aspx?id=23220

Problem Solve Every Day...it doesn’t have to be a written problem.  Help mom or dad figure out how much you need to spend on groceries, or how many ingredients you need when a recipe needs to be doubled.  Or how much weekly allowance do you need to save for that sweet new ipod 5?

Fractions and decimals aren’t going away.  Next year you have to know equivalent fractions without the pictures.  Practice. Practice. Practice.  When you eat pizza, cut the same size pizza into different sized slices and think about pizza as fractional parts!  

Science:
Wonder about life.  Wonder about nature.  Experience it.  Hike, bike, play, explore, but also think about why things are.  Research. Learn.  Have fun with life.

Social Studies:  

Start studying your states and capitols.  You have to memorize them in 5th grade.  Be curious about history and community.  

Love you all!  Have an excellent summer!

Guest Blog: Transforming Math Homework

About a week or so ago, Rayla Rucker, a fourth grade teacher at Pleasant Hill Elementary, asked me what I thought about some math homework she created for her class. As I opened the Google Doc, my eyes got huge and my heart jumped out of my chest. It was the best homework I have ever seen in math! So, I asked and Rayla agreed that she would share her thoughts on homework as our guest blogger this week! Thank you, Rayla, for inspiring us all as you do what's best for your students.

Homework.
There isn’t another word in the English language that elicits more dread.  Kids don’t want it, parents either want more or less of it, and teachers (myself at least) don’t have time to grade it…so, usually it is a meaningless endeavor that no one is happy about.  I mean, sure, there will always be student’s that have it in your hand before it’s due, but there will also be kids that never, EVER turn it in no matter how many times you call or email.  

So, how did I get all my kids and a lot of my parents (I can only speak for the ones that have tweeted or emailed about it) excited about math homework???

It all started with a tweet.

If you talk to Mark Koller, my principal, about me,  he’ll probably joke and say...”Be careful, she’ll tweet about you!”  because he knows I have gone a little twitter crazy.  The above tweet was one of my first with a real life problem solving idea.  I thought, how can I make kids and parents see that math isn’t just something you do for 75 minutes a day 5 days a week?

And then this happened,

and I thought, “Well that’s pretty awesome! Maybe I’m on the right track.”

This was just the beginning of a shift in thinking about what math is, or can be, or maybe should be.

I have a student that just can’t stand math.  He rushes through worksheet assignments and turns them in without a second glance with an abysmal degree of success. One day he was done, and I was meeting with a group and I just could not get him to settle.  I was irritated.  So, I called him up, handed him one of those catalogues we all get, full of junk to buy for our  classrooms. I said, “Hey, Johnny (names changed to protect the innocent),  I have $50 to spend on the classroom store.  Can you take this catalogue and see how much we can get?  I want the most and best for the money. Write down the items, how many we’ll receive, and the total spent and give it back to me.”  Well imagine my shock when he spent a couple of days quietly studying,  adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers and decimals.  He was doing a whole lot of math without even realizing it.   A reluctant student was all over it, AND the math was correct.  The difference in real life, she’s going to order these things for our classroom, let me help...and ugh, another boring worksheet, was definitely apparent.  

Obviously, that made me realize that maybe, just maybe math worksheets weren’t the way to go.  Honestly, I have never been a fan of worksheets, but in math especially, I saw the benefit of extra practice.  It’s weird because in Language Arts I have always been a stickler about keeping everything authentic, so why the disconnect in math.  Can math be authentic?  What would that look like? That’s when I met Beth Chinderle.  

Beth sat down with my team, answered our questions, and helped me understand what authentic math could look like.  The best part was she gave me permission to cut out the worksheets for homework.  I don’t know why I needed that permission, but I did.  From there, my brain was really on fire with the possibilities.  One night, I was sitting at the computer and it came to me.  I created a choice board revolving around what families and kids actually do in their everyday lives that will allow them to practice the specific skills we are exploring and learning in class.  They can see from these choices that math is a skill, like reading that they will do all of their lives, and can be enjoyable.  

So, I tweeted about it, sent an email about the change, and nervously brought it to my students.  I guess the nervousness came from my excitement, I mean, what if they hated it?  They gave me that familiar, what are you up to now glance and looked it over.  I went through the choices with them and they were totally digging it.  

Now, I have been teaching long enough to know that the initial excitement can dwindle when the task has to actually be accomplished, but to my surprise the next day when I asked how many of them had done their homework, over half raised their hands.  On Friday, homework was due, and every single kiddo was excited to share what they had done.  Many of them had completed 2, 3, or 4 of the tasks.  They were only asked to do one for the week.  Several even asked if they could submit ideas for the next time!  

This change in homework is part of an even bigger, and much scarier transformation of my math class.  Scarier because it’s not what I am used to, but maybe it’s just what I, and more importantly my students need.  So, I am happy, proud of my kiddos, and a little proud of myself, too.  To me, students are like play dough, they roll and bend with the changes easily.  Most teachers, though, are more like that really hard modeling clay.  We can and will change, but it takes a lot more work to get us warmed up enough to shift in a new direction.

Check out the homework here: Rayla's Real Life Math Homework

Thank you again, Rayla, for sharing your journey! :) I've also added this post to the Math Classroom Series as an important element of the math classroom.

Mathematizing the World

As educators, we often get asked, "How can I help my child at home?"

One way of supporting children's mathematical development is to help them "mathematize" their world by seeing math all around.  Start by being curious about your child's ideas and what they are pondering.  Notice everyday experiences and ask questions that help build on their mathematical thinking. 

For example, when visiting the Texas State Fair last week, math was EVERYWHERE! 
It was easy to capture some digital images with the use of a smart phone.

How many fair tickets did I purchase?

If each ticket costs $2, how much money did I spend on tickets?

It takes 5 tickets to ride the bumper cars.  How many times can I ride?

How many ducks in the pond?
How could you group the ducks to easily count them? 
How many would there be if you added 1, 10 or 100?
What if you took one away?

Estimate the height of the Ferris wheel.
How many buckets are there?
If a bucket holds 3 people, how many people will the Ferris wheel hold?
If takes 45 minutes for one rotation on the Ferris wheel, how many minutes would 3 rotations take?

Look at the balloon array!
How many rows of balloons are there?
How many columns?
What is the product? 
How many 6x4 arrays can you find?
What fractional part is blue?

How many inches tall are you?
How many feet tall must you be to ride?  
If you are not tall enough, how many more inches must you grow?  
What is the difference between 36 inches and 42 inches?













Howdy BIG TEX!
If Big Tex is 52 feet tall, how many feet taller is he than you? 
How many inches tall is he?  
If Big Tex turned 60 years old in 2012, what year was he built?

When our children are thinking like mathematicians, they make sense of numbers, learn to persevere, are able to reason, and use multiple strategies to solve problems.  All of these things help our children become passionate about math in the world we live. 

I challenge you to "mathematize the world" and have some rich conversations with your child.