A boy who won't stop making "jokes" about shooting people or having a weapon, another who still isn't making friends because it's easier to make enemies, and some so-so test and quiz grades. My first week fully in charge of all the classes, and I survived.
Actually, it wasn't as bad as all that. The modified classes took pretty well to all the measurement lessons, and the fifth grade class seemed to like the Touch Math lesson I did on Friday. During my three prior years of teaching, I'd seen a few kids do this funny thing they'd learned in elementary school, where they touched the point of their pencil to certain places on the digits to figure out a calculation. Now I know how it works (and where the "dots" go on each number), my cooperating teacher and I have decided it will be particularly useful for the modified classes to use the method.
Most of these kids are still using counting strategies to add and subtract. Most deaf kids don't count out loud -- they count on their fingers. They have a slight advantage over most kids who try to count on their fingers -- with the ASL number system, they can count indefinitely on one hand. So, to do a problem such as 7 + 5, they might hold five on their passive hand, start with seven on their dominant hand, and move it along their five fingers as they count '8-9-10-11-12'. The weakness (and really, really annoying thing for both me and my cooperating teacher) is that they have to drop their pencil, figure it out, then pick up their pencil again to write down the answer. If they're doing a three-digit plus three-digit problem, that's three put-down-and-pick-ups just for one problem.
With Touch Math, their pencil can stay in their hand the whole time. For 7 + 5, their passive hand would hold seven, then they would tap their pencil on the "dots" for the five one by one, as their passive hand counted up from 7 to 12. They get through their problems a lot faster, they actually think it's fun to do, and some kids noticed on their own that for addition, it's faster if you start from the larger number (because they visually saw it had more dots to count on).
Now my big wish is that more of the kids would notice the easy things, particularly with subtraction. For instance, the idea that a number subtracted from itself is always zero. Or, a number subtracted by the number just before it is always one. It's very frustrating watching kids count their way through 9 - 8 over and over. Basically, they're only understanding subtraction as "taking away" that many, instead of the "difference" or how far apart those two numbers are.
This week is Spring Break (thank goodness!) That means I have time to really think about some lesson planning, so maybe I'll come up with something to help them get a broader view of subtraction.
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Have you considered teaching rote memorization of the addition and subtraction facts? Your students clearly know how to get the answers, and a few hours' drill spread out over a week or two would provide them with instant recall. It does take some work, but the end result is immensely liberating--the answers to these fundamental pieces of the puzzle are just "there" at their fingertips, and their minds are freed to look at the big picture.
ReplyDeleteThere are all kinds of game formats available for drills in basic facts. Algebra is so much easier when you don't have to spend mental energy on 14–6.
Posted by Greta
Most of these kids have difficulty with memorization (among other things, like language in general). In 5th or 6th grade, their overall academic performance level ranges from kindergarten to 2nd grade in most cases. So we're generally happy when they can figure out the problem, or when they can consistently recognize whether they need to regroup or not.
ReplyDeleteSome of the kids have caught on and memorized some of the facts. Lately we've been focusing on helping them memorize multiplication facts, because they take so much longer to "figure out" than addition or subtraction.
Posted by Rachel