Assessing Talking Turkey

The Turkey is all gobbled up! And it was a success. I am so pleased with the math that came out of it.

Once the problems were solved, groups of students came to the front of the class and presented their solutions. They were showing their peers how they solved the problem, reasoning and justifying their thinking and teaching others how to do things such as add fractions and decimals, represent decimals to add, and even introduced mixed numbers and improper fractions. I don't think I could have done a better job. They were drawing out their representations on the white board and using manipulatives to model their thinking.

The picture above shows how one particular student went about solving the problem. He used pictures to help him understand the problem; the circles within circles represent the amount of turkey each person in Sam's family ate, with one small circle representing 1/4 kg. He then took this information and drew a number line to show that he was meeting all the requirements for the problem as he had to prove that Uncle Roy, for example, at the most and Judy the least. He also used the number line to help him get the total amount of turkey that was ate. From there he went on to represent each amount using fractions, including improper fractions and then mixed numbers. He spent the majority of his presentation teaching his peers about these two concepts and most actually understood it. Oh, and did I mention that his mom told me that he did not like math and that he had a lot of trouble with it in previous years!! I was impressed to say the least.

So basically this is how my math year is going to unfold. Today, I am planning a little follow up to see how much students learned from these activities. I plan to do a quick assessment of representing decimals, and then give them a situation where they have to decide if three decimals are ordered correctly. One of the outcomes in Grade 6 is the multiply a whole number by a decimal number, so I will also do a preassessment to see where everyone is with this which will help me decide where to go next in instruction.

Monday we will be starting a new problem called Pumpkin Patch Picking. Stay tuned!