Comments+Week+of+April+11

Please note the summaries for our last meetings are on last week's (April 4) notes so you may want to peruse those if you haven't already. Now that the FCAT dust has settled, I'm really excited about you all doing something brilliant with place value :) You can do it! So, thinking back over our discussions, I see the following weak links in our place value development: 1. Our students aren't fully accepting or understanding the "bundling" action of place value. With our younger students, it may sometimes be developmental and/or directly connected to a weak ability to use cardinality. Although they can say that's a group of 5, they have to start back at 1 and count all when adding on. 2. This also plays out in higher grades when they say 20 has 2 tens but have difficulty unpacking it into 1 ten and 10 ones. The idea of going to a "unit of higher value, decomposing it, and getting what is needed in order to subtract the units of lesser value" is an essential understanding but extremely difficult for many of our students. 3. Flexibly working with the relationships between place values such as knowing 275 has 27 tens or 2 hundreds and 5 tens is important for deep understanding of place value yet it is not directly attacked in our text (or in any texts I've seen) other than the Asian ones. So, we need lessons that address this essential understanding.

So, I'm seeing us go in one of these 3 directions: "bundling", unpacking units of higher value, or relationship between place values. I am fully open to something else I just thought we should start focusing on one area of place value. You know, this really needs us to develop several lessons, not just one research lesson. Yikes.

What do you think? Becky

We'd have to figure out how we could give kids yet another experience with the idea of bundling in place value. Maybe we need to think about un-bundling (is that a word?)?? Unpacking place value makes me think about adding and subtracting (or what would come just before that). The flexibility between place value gets me thinking about asking students how many different ways they could build a number such as 275...What if we use only 100s, use only 10s, use only 1s, etc. and rich discussion that could take place with that. It would be so great to develop a number of lessons, but time doesn't seem to be on our side! Hopefully we'll get a lot out of the developmental story and can give suggestions where to put integral lessons/discussions/experiences. I'm leaning towards doing a lesson on flexibility between place values, I think because my brain is intermeidate (okay, my brain isn't but my students' are!) But, maybe we need to start from the very beginning since we know our texts are "weak" and we know building a strong foundation is extremely important...

:) Heather

I agree. Flexibility between place values is definitely where thinking breaks down in our students. Once our students learn to add and subtract without regrouping, they tend to think very rigidly along place value lines, in spite of all the mental math and alternative strategies. I think our students need more work building numbers with manipulativers in many different ways. When we reviewed regrouping again, very few children could explain what it means and that despite all of the regrouping and renaming, we still start with the same amount. (If that makes sense)

Diane

I agree Diane....Even now going back to the beginning of the year concepts with plave value, some students still donot have mastery of place value. I started more with Algebraic Expressions and variables and I see regrouping errors when plugging back into the variable. I ask them "Does this make sense?" and some I feel I get the blank stare.

Kym