We started out by reflecting on 2017 and a best practice we want to focus on the first half of 2018.
Our Learning Targets for the day were:
1. I can understand the progression of fractions across grade levels.
2. I can internalize how to increase rigor with fractions.
3. I can describe the impact of number talks on understanding fractions.
We discussed how we learned fractions when we were in school, and how the focus has shifted to developing a deep conceptual understanding (versus just procedural), which requires a different approach.
Each grade level team took a deep dive into their fraction standards and presented them to the group.
We also participated in rich, investigative tasks that support the goals of developing a deep understanding of fractions.
We compared rich tasks for each grade level to approaches used to teach these concepts in the past (primarily worksheets), reiterating the importance of utilizing best practices to teach for conceptual understanding.
We discussed the crucial vertical alignment of fraction standards and related it to a tree:
- 2nd Grade - The roots are the foundation for fractions obtained from partitioning shapes and beginning to use the terminology of halves, fourths, etc.
- 3rd Grade - The trunk of the tree (the core) represents the crucial "meaning" of fractions obtained in 3rd grade; without this meaning, students cannot be proficient with standards in 4th & 5th.
- 4th Grade - The large branches represent the concepts of equivalence and decomposition of fractions, which is crucial to performing operations with fractions in 5th grade.
- 5th Grade - The many smaller branches represent the many operations students are performing with fractions in the 5th grade.
We examined all of the fraction number talks contained in our curriculum guides and related them to the content standards. We realized how crucial our number talks are for students to develop proficiency with fractions.
