Writing 'Baselines' & Math Charades

BASELINES
Today, students had a choice in writing tasks: write a news report about an event in their life OR write a review of a game, movie or book. Over the next few months, we will be developing our skills in report and review writing but for now I just needed a 'baseline'--an idea of what their writing is like before teacher intervention & instruction. This will let me know everyone's 'starting point' and their areas of need for growth. We will work on growing the quality of their writing over the year. What they write for me today should look very different from a sample at the end of the year. (ie: It should look better!)

MATH BOOSTER

We also started something today that I call 'math booster' and this will be a weekly component to our language program. Ms. Scigliano teaches math in the afternoons but as a 'support' to those lessons I will be integrating math into the language curriculum. In my language program, one of my over all goals is to students to 'creatively and clearly communicate concepts." In this math booster class, students will creatively and clearly communicate MATH concepts using a variety of methods: oral presentations, writing (short stories, explanations, journals) and media (video creations, bitstripsforschools, etc).

We started with some fairly straightforward concepts today but the tricky part was figuring out how to portray them as 'gestures only' with a partner ('math charades'). So the concept of 'fractions'. for instance, was portrayed by a pair of students as miming cutting up a pizza or circle into pieces. Students reviewed the performances and were assessed on their listening skills (a component of their oral language curriculum).  The audience's job was also to guess the math concept being presented.

I hope by this example you can see how in this math booster session we will be looking at math through a variety of 'multiple intelligences', expressing it through gestures, picture & images, sounds, words/texts, as well as the traditional 'number' format. I'm hoping this approach will encourage a deeper understanding of math and also provide a venue for creative literacy expression.

The math concepts will, of course, grow in complexity over time... stay tuned!