Jackie Cooke’s K-5 Math Blog

My strong interest in interviewing children as a means of assessing their understanding has been a topic in many of the preceding blog posts. Over the next few months, I will share some of the insights and developmental lines we encountered as we did screening interviews on all students in Kindergarten through Second Grade. I plan to illustrate some of what I am writing about, with little video clips of interviews. Some of the videos are a bit rough. I was especially having trouble getting the audio and video to be aligned. I’m not a professional videographer, but I hope they will help you to see and understand the range of responses we got when we conducted these interviews.

Read the rest of this entry »

This year, in the position of Title I teacher, I have the privilege of teaching CORE math to second graders for one hour a day.  The second graders come from several different classrooms including a 1-2 blend.  Since that is one of my favorite grade levels to teach, I am enjoying myself immensely. This came about as the result of cuts in teaching positions at our school and some odd numbers of students at different grade levels, so the principal made the decision to configure two of our classes as blended classrooms. Our district has a policy that all children will be taught at least an hour of CORE math and ninety minutes of reading at their appropriate grade level. Hence, In response to that policy, the result has been that I, the Title I teacher, was assigned to teach a CORE class at my school. Of course, this takes away from the time that could be used to hone in on interventions for a larger group of students, but no other solution seemed to present itself. There is no way for a blend teacher to provide the 90 minutes of CORE reading and math for two different grade levels in the way that our district is requiring and still have time to do anything else in a day. My position as Title I Math Teacher is very unusual in my district. There are no other Title Math teachers at any of our other elementary schools. So, does this mean that no other schools will consider creating blended classrooms to solve problems with the numbers of students at various grade levels? In this time of tight budgets, I highly doubt it. What do other schools do about blends? Are there any strategies for teaching this type of classroom configuration when a school doesn’t have the luxury of an extra certified teacher on staff as is the case in my school? Read the rest of this entry »

Repeat visitors to my blog know that several different posts since 2009 have explored the topic of screening our youngest students (K-2) through the use of interview assessments rather than waiting until students are proficient at taking multiple choice tests. That led to my sharing on this blog site, and in printed articles in The Oregon Mathematics Teacher (TOMT) magazine, a series of articles that dealt with the topic of interview assessments. After several years of trying out many variations with lots of students at the k-2 level, I was finally able to narrow down to 3 or 4 questions at each grade level that seemed to give the best indicators of students who would struggle in math.

A recent message from Jenny Carloni, a teacher in Roseburg, Oregon has me devoting yet another entry to this topic.

Hello Ms. Cooke,

I’ve been reading about your screening assessments in TOMT.  I have an incoming third grade class.  What would you recommend as a good beginning-of-the-year screener to identify their basic mathematical understanding?  I’ll appreciate anything you send my way.

Thank you,
Jenny Carloni, 3rd Grade Teacher

In response to Jennifer’s message, I am uploading to this blog the most current versions of my K_2 Screening Assessment.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s September!  Time to get the dust off the shelves, the bulletin boards up and a big warm welcome out to all those bright and shiny faces as they enter the doors of our classroom on during these first days. The kinds of things we do with our students in the very beginning of the year, set the tone for the whole year. One thing I like to do is tell stories to my students. I tell them stories from my childhood, like how scared I was my very first day of school. I’d been sick with the chicken pox so had to start school a bit later than everyone else. I still remember the terror and embarrassment I felt coming in to that classroom. I attempted to sit at a desk only to be told by another child that I was sitting in an assigned seat for somebody else. After my third attempt to sit down somewhere, I ended up standing against a wall in confusion until the teacher finally rescued me. I use that story to help students get to know me as a human being and also help those who are a bit fearful themselves to know they have landed in a safe spot.

I thought it would be a good idea to start out this year with another story. Read the rest of this entry »

My last blog of the year is dedicated to the teachers of Highland and John Wetten Elementary Schools. They came through a pretty stressful and at times disheartening school year with grace and fortitude. It inspired me to work harder to find resources and answers to their questions. In this blog, I’d like to share some of the answers we’ve discovered together.

First of all, it is critical to have a clear and coherent vision of mathematics instruction. There are many balls a teacher needs to juggle simultaneously. I chose to use a stool to illustrate to our teachers what I believed were the essential components. On one leg of the stool I placed the caption Conceptual Understanding.  It is critical that classroom teachers have a deep understanding of the mathematics of their grade level standards. We created curriculum maps to identify which standards at which time of year we would focus instruction around. Once that was in place, we looked through all the resources available to us to find the best instructional materials to teach those standards.

On the next leg of the stool I placed the label Problem Solving.  Read the rest of this entry »

A heater’s failure spoiled Endeavour’s countdown on Friday, April 29th. Troubleshooting over this weekend may help pinpoint the problem so that the shuttle will be able to launch into space as early as Monday, May 2^nd for Endeavour’s final liftoff. Endeavour’s mission to the International Space Station, known as STS-134, represents the shuttle’s last scheduled flight before retirement and the second-last flight of the 30-year space shuttle program.  NASA plans to conduct the STS-135 mission with a potential launch date of June 28.

As you may be aware, to honor the history of the space shuttle missions and their significant contributions to space science, I have been sharing a series of video clips and lesson plans. Read the rest of this entry »

As you know from the last couple of blog entries, I have been sharing mathematical problem solving lesson plans and video clips that focus around a theme of space exploration. Today while I was home for a snow day, I watched with interest the launch of the space shuttle Discovery. As the shuttle roared out into space, the announcer mentioned that after this flight, its next stop will be The Smithsonian. Discovery, the oldest and most-flown shuttle in NASA’s fleet, will be retired at the end of this 11-day mission to the International Space Station. To date, Discovery has traveled 143 million miles and carried 246 crew members into space since its first flight in 1984. On its 39th and final flight, STS 133 is carrying the Italian-built Permanent Multipurpose Module, Express Logistics Carrier 4 and Robonaut 2, the first humanoid robot in space, to the International Space Station.

Watching Discovery’s launch was perfectly timed. It motivated me to add this month’s post to the blog. The video lesson clip and  lesson plan for this February focus on the Hubble Space Telescope.  I hope you will be as intrigued by Hubble as I have been.

During the year of my award as Oregon’s Teacher of the Year (2007), I was excited and a bit intimidated to learn that all of the Teachers of the Year (TOYs) would be attending Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. While there, I learned some important lessons that have continued to serve me well. One of the reasons I felt a bit intimidated was that we attended Space Camp with TOYs from many countries around the world. I found myself worrying about what a simple first grade teacher from Oregon had to contribute to this amazing group of teachers.

I’m not sure what I contributed to them, but I know the experience was life changing for me. In last month’s blog I shared about how I used some of my experiences at Space Camp as the foundation for a series of video lessons I’m going to be posting to the blog over the next few months. This next video lesson for the New Year, is one of my favorites. Read the rest of this entry »

This last summer, I had the privilege of attending the Mobile Learning Institute in Washington, D.C. during the week of July 11 through the 16^th.  This institute was co-sponsored by the Pearson Foundation and The Smithsonian.  State Teachers of the Year (TOY) from 2007, 2008, and 2009 were invited to apply and 12 of us were selected as the Fellows to attend this session. Fellows had the chance to meet with Smithsonian educators and curators, and to explore first-hand the assets and learning materials that Smithsonian museums make available to teachers and classrooms. With this background, we then took part in extensive professional development sessions, during which time we had the chance to explore the latest digital and mobile technologies and to test ways these technologies could be applied to improve teaching and learning in the classrooms. Other sessions held throughout the summer and fall  have had attendees representing other teacher and student groups, (and there was another TOY group that flew in the last week of July and focused on resources from the Smithsonian’s US History Museum). Our session utilized resources at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) and National Postal Museum (NPM). We were divided up into teams of 4. My team concentrated on the Skylab Orbital Museum on display at SASM to design a series of related lesson activities around. You can view the series of video clips our group created as a result of our participation in this institute without having to become a member.  I am also uploading to this blog, the lesson plans Learning Plan Skylab Pt1 and Learning Plan Skylab Pt2 I created to utilize and extend the learning ideas introduced in the videos. Read the rest of this entry »