Jackie Cooke’s K-5 Math Blog

This has been a crazy beginning of the year for me. That is why you have not seen a blog post until now. After three different teaching assignments and moving schools twice, I am finally settling in to a half time Title I Reading and Math Support position at Hogan Cedars Elementary in the Gresham Barlow School District. The math support part of my position will be to work with second graders again this year. I am looking forward to sharing with you some of the amazing problem solving these young students are capable of doing.

Currently one of my second grade groups is working to develop number sense and another group’s lessons are centered on addition and subtraction strategy concepts. Both groups are focusing on “fiveness” right now. Counting by fives and looking for patterns, connecting skip counting by fives to the number of fingers as they perform a High Five Chant, decomposing numbers into fives and some more, are just some of the ways the number sense group’s students are utilizing their understanding of five to decompose numbers.
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The year is winding down for us. At my school we are busily interviewing students one last time to prepare report cards and anecdotal comments to let parents know what students could continue working on over summer vacation. Many of our second graders are able to show a lot of what they know in written assessments by this time of year but there are still times when we need to follow up with more questions to understand what a student knows. The interviews are really helpful for that

In previous blogs I wrote about students demonstrating counting and place value understandings. The number sense concepts we’ve looked at previously lead up to the development of a solid foundation in students’ operational thinking. That will be the topic of this last blog entry for the year.

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Author’s Note: Later in this post I will share some video clips of interviews with students that I have uploaded to my YouTube channel. When you get to the end of each clip, come back to this site. The other video clips displayed on the screen at the end are something YouTube does but have no connection to the topic of this entry.

I’m old enough to remember the Art Linkletter Show called “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” Here’s a funny story that I believe could have been played on this show. One day the students in my friend’s kindergarten class were brainstorming to prepare for a journal writing activity. They were sharing ideas of their “wishes” they could then record on falling stars. One kindergartner’s special wish was for it to be her birthday every day of the year. Another bright kindergartner quipped right back, “If we had a birthday every day, we sure wouldn’t live very long.”

I hope I live long enough to see a time when our youngest and most vulnerable citizens are made a priority in our communities. When I was Oregon’s Teacher of the Year in 2007, I did a lot of speaking around the state and even in other parts of the country where one of my main messages was to urge states to find funding to mandate full day kindergarten programs in our schools. If interested, you can download the Early_Childhood_Slideshow I created for a presentation a couple years ago where I was asked to speak about the importance of early childhood education.

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Author’s Note: Later in this post I will share some video clips of interviews with students that I have uploaded to my YouTube channel. When you get to the end of each clip come back to this site. The other video clips displayed on the screen at the end are something YouTube does but have no connection to the topic of this entry.

I have been blessed to have an ongoing ability to interact with fellow Teachers of the Year (TOY) from around the country ever since I was named Oregon’s TOY in 2007. As an example, last year many postings on this blog were about lessons that were inspired by my participation in the Mobile Learning Institute. I flew to Washington D.C. in the summer of 2010 along with 15 other fellow TOY to participate in this institute sponsored by Pearson Learning Group, Nokia and the Smithsonian.

This year, we are taking advantage of participating in webinars sponsored by the Center for Teaching Quality and CCSSO to provide professional development opportunities to our group. Our first webinar had as guest speaker, Marc Tucker, currently the executive director of the National Center on Education and the Economy and a leader of the standards-driven education reform movement for many years. In this webinar Mr. Tucker shared some of the findings from his new book, Surpassing Shanghai. This book was published by Harvard Education Press in September of 2011. It explores the question, “What would the education policies and practices of the United States be if they were based on the policies and practices of the countries that now lead the world in student performance?” The research on the highest performing countries was performed by a team assembled by the National Center on Education and the Economy, at the request of the OECD.
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Author’s Note: Later in this post I will share some video clips of interviews with students that I have uploaded to my YouTube channel. When you get to the end of each clip come back to this site. The other video clips displayed on the screen at the end are something YouTube does but have no connection to the topic of this entry.

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 hurdles students seem to come up against as we did screening interviews on all students in Kindergarten through Second Grade. I have illustrated some of what I am writing about, with short video clips of interviews. Some of the videos are a bit rough. 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.

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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? (more…)

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.

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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. (more…)

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.  (more…)