What the candidate learned

I did my practicum at Sheridan Japanese School in Sheridan. I taught Math to the sixth grade students. One thing what I learned was implementing literacy is very important to support students with their learning. Math is often about numbers, but I planned to implement literacy in an assignment when I taught them after the worksample. I wrote questions for the assignment after they learned various operations in fractions and mixed numbers.

I noticed that the students had kept making similar mistakes over and over. I collected nine questions that they were confused the most. In the assignment, I asked them to explain what they knew about important ideas on each question before they solved them. For example, I asked to explain how they wanted to decide rounding to estimate sums and differences of fractions and mixed numbers. One of the examples of explanation would be such that we will round up a fraction if the numerator is as big as the denominator.  Then, I asked to estimate a sum using the knowledge. Another example was to ask to write two important things to remember when they found the product of a fraction and a whole number. One of answering examples might be to write the whole number as a fraction with a denominator of 1. After the question, I asked to find a product of a mixed number and a whole number to verify the knowledge. I also mentioned the units of the textbook where they might want to look up to get information for their writing. I was afraid that the writing task might be too easy for them because each unit of the book had a boxed area where important concepts were summarized to help understand the unit.

I was very surprised when I saw that their answers were not what I expected. The first thing that I noticed was students left out many sections of writing questions without writing anything. About a half of them were left blank. The second thing was that many words were misspelled in the writing when they wrote. A student spelled “burrow” for “borrow”. Another spelled “semplify” for “simplify”. There were also a numerous grammatical errors. Many of periods and commas were missed out. Some sentences started with a lower-case letter. They often wrote incomplete sentences such as “times and plus to get an improper fraction”.  When proper subjects and verbs were missing, I did not know what they talked about. Some writing was not legible at all. I did not see any satisfactory writing.

Leaving out explanation did not mean that they did not do correctly. Students did some right computation even when they did not explain their ideas of what they should know. However, I realized that students tended to answer more correctly in computation if they explained concepts or important things before they solved problems. They tended to make more mistakes if they did not explain anything at all. Through this experience, I learned that literacy was very important in Math as well to support their thinking. Clarifying their thinking by writing out seemed to help them develop their mathematical ideas. I want to develop literacy strategies further to improve students' learning for the future.