Avoidance

So I should be working on grading assessments, and math continuums and ESL paperwork, but instead I will write this blog post.

This week is killing me with the teacher paper work! My head is going to explode! Anyone else in crunch time?

My birthday was this week so I gave myself some school time off which led me to being so behind! Ah!!

Anyways, in class we are working on subtraction. This was something my students are still struggling with so I did a review lesson today. I used the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. If you haven't checked it out, it is awesome!

I started by having students complete the problem on their white boards then we went over it together.

The great thing about this website is that when you put the red cubes on top of the blue cubes the blue ones disappear. Also, when you borrow, you just move the rod to the ones, and it will break apart into the ones. The students seemed to really understand how it works now.

We did several problems like this and I also showed them how to subtract by expanding using the Singapore methods. In the above problem, you would say that it was 100 +60+12 and the bottom number was 80+5. Then subtract the 12-5 and get 7 and 100-80 and get 20 plus the 60 that is there, so 80 plus the 7 left over. So the answer is 87.

I think I cleared up some misconceptions. Now, to work on other things they are confused about before they take the NWEA next week (equivalent fractions, number lines, line plots etc!).

I hope you all are going less crazy then me! If you are equally crazy, please tell me what you are procrastinating!