Saturday, January 17, 2015

Celebrate This Week - I Understand!

Today I am celebrating, making sense of bar models for myself, for my students and with my students.  I've taught a long time.  I've heard about bar models but hadn't taken on learning about them before I left third grade to teach kindergarten.  Now that I'm back teaching second grade bar models became some new learning I needed to figure out.  

I'm celebrating - 

1.  Bar models can help you make sense of a math problem.

2.  Bar models do not provide an answer.

3.  Bar models can help you figure out what operation to use.

4.  Bar models involve reading carefully.

5.  Bar models are a sophisticated pictorial representation.

6.  Bar models are helpful when working with larger numbers.

I've been wrestling with a resource I have available and got really excited when I could decode some gobble-ly gook and simplify our thinking for some anchor charts to guide our work.  I did model the word problems after ones in my resource for some consistency between that and my thinking.








Thank you Ruth, for supporting us in finding the positive in our busy lives.
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7 comments:

  1. Carrie GelsonJanuary 17, 2015 at 1:52 PM

    So great! Loving all the celebration posts highlighting math today! These are definitely showcase sophisticated pictorial representation - but make things very clear.

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    1. MandyJanuary 18, 2015 at 10:36 PM

      It really does make things very clear and the journey to get there as their first introduction had some rough patches but we made it!

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  2. Michele KnottJanuary 17, 2015 at 3:32 PM

    Our school in IL using bar modeling a lot, too. Since I'm a reading specialist I haven't really tried to understand it, but from what I hear it has helped the kids. Hope you see a difference!

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    Replies
    1. MandyJanuary 18, 2015 at 10:37 PM

      Thanks for sharing your experience from afar, so kind of you to take the time to share a comment.

      Delete
  3. KendraJanuary 18, 2015 at 8:38 AM

    This is very interesting. I'll be looking at this again. But anything that will build understanding in math, bring it on! I see you are still hosting Math Monday. Hopefully I'll be linking up soon. :)

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    Replies
    1. MandyJanuary 18, 2015 at 10:39 PM

      Kendra, I'm looking forward to your Math Monday post and I'm glad you have been following along. Hope to see you soon.

      Delete
  4. Amy RuddJanuary 18, 2015 at 11:02 PM

    I heard bar models Will be a large piece of the new PARCC math PBA! Thanks for sharing your thinking and creating the anchor charts!

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