Our Third Grade Classroom

The preparations are well underway as an exhausting yet thrilling week of pre-planning comes to an end. Our superhero theme, Empowering the Future, made it easy to decorate for the student WOW factor, and no detail was overlooked as we strived for an organized classroom that would provide purpose and limit student transition time between activities. I feel like we were thoughtful and successful in setting up a learning community that will meet the needs of our students and ourselves. Take a sneak peek inside our classroom before the learning journey begins...

The Hallway of Our Learning Headquarters

Upon rounding the corner, the hallway comes alive with color thanks to the hard work of a parent volunteer who graciously gave up days of her summer to help us WOW our future students. The black clothespins fastened securely to red construction paper await the hanging of student work that soon will adorn this Hall of Fame. 

 We welcome all superheroes on this year's learning adventure!

At the bottom of our yellow promotion cards, filled out on every student at the end of each year, the teacher writes something good about the student. The incoming teacher uses that valuable piece of information to make sure that every student feels loved as they enter their classroom on the first day of school in the new year. This tradition titled, I know something good about you, has been a Chets Creek tradition since our doors opened in 1998. This year my co-teacher, Miss Russell, had the great idea of creating bookmarks to post the Something Good About You sayings so when the board comes down students can track their reading with their new bookmark.

The Math, Science, and Social Studies heroes are ready to go outside the Headquarter of Learning.

Our classroom plaques remind us of our Guiding Vision, Learner Outcomes, and Core Values. 

A sneak peek inside our classroom... You may notice the stars over each table which have been set up purposefully with table groups and numbers that will be used for rituals and routines around gathering materials and working in small groups.

The bare walls are departmentalized with an area designated for math, science, and social studies artifacts. Hot gluing plastic clips makes it easy to put up and remove necessary charts as student learning unfolds.

The cubbies are numbered with a metal shelf in between to make sure that student back packs are organized and are not a distraction to learning.

There is a corner designated for our Math EDC area. Calendar, clocks, two hundreds chart, measuring tools, place value charts, thermometer, counting tape, and math manipulatives are set up and ready to go.

   

Calendar

Place Value Chart

Organized and Labeled Math Manipulatives

 Counting Tape--Set up in groups of five and ten will make it easy to record each day of the school year. Cards are waiting for numbers 1-180 and students will look for many patterns along the way.

Our classroom has a gathering area were students can come to the floor and be up close and personal for classroom lessons. To secure the carpets, double sided tape works like a charm.

The board set up with colored masking tape allows for ease in recording the day's events and essential questions. Notice that just below the whiteboard our number line is easily seen and reachable by all students. 

Above the board, we have math strategies posted.

Math and Science Portfolios and items used for Tuesday Folders.

The word wall, though blank, is set up and ready for learning. Velcro dots secured to laminated posterboard and attached to the classroom cabinets leave plenty of space to display words. The words are pre-made on Avery labels that have been attached to index cards and laminated. The front of the card has the word and the back of the card has the definition. After words are embedded in classroom instruciton, they can be easily found placed on the word wall from pencil pouches organized in a three ring binder by unit. The words can be taken down by a student if they need to look up a definition and placed easily back on the chart with the velcro.

Thank you to Melissa for such a great system that keeps on giving! We miss you!

We have five student computer stations in our classroom. In addition, Miss Russell and her former co-teacher, Mrs. Ross, were selected as technology magnets in our district, so we are blessed to have a laptop cart, too. We will certainly put them to good use this year!

Our PTA sponsors Sunshine Math, an additional math homework sheet, used to push student learning to new levels. We are prepared to record and reward students who are going above and beyond the call of duty.

In third grade, students will learn how to multiply and divide. We have two doors in our classroom designated to record student progress. As they master a set, they will get to "sign the door."

Student work bulletin board is ready for some SUPER work!

With part of our science textbook adoption, we received leveled science readers. We removed the books from their boxes, organized them by their science content and put them out in our Research Library.

Each day when students enter our classroom, they will receive two SOLAR dollars. They will log their money in their account books and keep their money in pencil pouches in the pouches on the back of their chairs. Students will have the opportunity to save their money and spend it on our store items when the store opens each week. We have items to buy, but more maybe more popular, items to rent. Offering items like Teacher Assistant, special desk, special chair, and extra computer time are great perks that don't need to be replenished by the teacher. Kids can also rent popular games and have time to play during Store Hours.

(Displayed beside the Store is our birthday wall and this year students will get to wear a birthday cape on their special day. Pictures to follow soon.)

Science can be messy business and time consuming, but with prearranged rituals and routines, it doesn't have to be. These cheap ($2) trays are labeled by table number and already contain student maginifying glasses. In the morning, science items for experiments and labs can be set up, and student handlers can easily transport their trays during classtime.

I hope you enjoyed the "sneak peek." Stay tuned as we begin this year's learning adventure...

Empowering the Future

Learning Leaders will emerge from summer vacation and return to another exciting school year in just four short days. As always, we will be greeted with a new school theme and a 180 teaching days full of new possibilities.  With this school theme, I know the kids will transform from tired eyed and groggy to alert and energized!  The Learning Headquarters are going through a supersized superhero transformation as we speak. Stay tuned...


Chets Creek Elementary – Empowering the Future! from Melanie Holtsman on Vimeo.

A New Learning Journey

After much time and consideration during the last year, I've made the decision to return to my roots and head back into the classroom. I couldn't be more excited. Over the past decade, other than a short one year hiatus to another state, I've been dedicated to moving curriculum and instruction forward in our elementary school as the Instructional Coach. And, though I've enjoyed every moment, I'm overjoyed to embark on a new opportunity.

This year's learning journey will have me teaching in a third grade departmentalized co-teach setting. Miss Russell and I will share a classroom and have a group of 36 learners in the morning and a different group of 36 learners in the afternoon. We will teach Math, Science, and Social Studies.

My partners and I, known this year as Solr Power due to our superheroes-Empowering the Future- theme, will have a classroom blog dedicated to communicating with our parents and students. However, most likely, some of my thoughts will end up here, as they won't be relevant to the other blog's purpose. Stay tuned as the new journey begins...

Exit Tickets

As math educators, we must make broad judgments daily about whether the class understood the day’s lesson before we move on with instruction the next day. The pulse of the class is taken easily because of the level of student interaction and discussion during the questioning segment of the lesson, but it’s harder to get a clear picture of what individual students have mastered and are able to do independently. Though whole group instruction may move forward the next day, it is our responsibility to ensure that all students are reaching mastery. We need to know specifically students who need small group reteaching or more support for success. Because, at CCE we are aware that retention rates for students are highest when they teach others (90%), practice by doing (75%), and partake in discussion groups (50%), many days my students are working in pairs or small groups in math. There is not always the opportunity to collect independent student work, so we needed another teaching strategy to accomplish the goal of knowing whether every student was at mastery on the day’s work.

Exit Tickets have become our answer. An Exit Ticket is a formative teaching strategy given immediately after the Math Workshop concludes which focuses students on the core content of a lesson and promotes a quick and independent assessment check. Each student answers a question or two that targets the big idea for the day. The checkpoint, taking only a few minutes, offers teachers the immediate opportunity to check students’ independent mastery of the day’s content.

Exit Tickets are simple and time efficient to create and analyze. When preparing for a lesson the teacher has to think, “If I teach this math concept or skill effectively, which question should students be able to answer at the end of the lesson?” This question or two should align with the big idea.

Typically, we create an Exit Ticket on a ½ sheet of paper for easy distribution and collection. Having it on a ½ sheet of paper makes it effortless to sort students’ work into piles once the task is complete and collected. Within minutes, you can have several stacks of student work. One stack of student work proves independent mastery of the lesson, the second stack contains student’s work where mastery is not clear and more information is needed, and the third stack demonstrates work with misconceptions or lack of understanding. Students whose work is in the first pile need no additional instruction; Students whose work is in the second pile need a teacher to confer with them so they can explain or justify their answer because the written work did not prove mastery. With this quick conferring session, the teacher can tell whether or not additional instruction is needed. If additional instruction is needed, the teacher can pull the student into a small group during the next day’s Work Session. Students whose work is in the third pile need small group reteaching to acquire more knowledge on the concept or skill. In addition, they may need more strategic questioning during whole group instruction and more feedback during the Work Session as the concept or skill is developed.

As a rule, the whole process of Exit Tickets takes little time and provides great benefit. Teachers don’t have to wait for a summative check on a math quiz or assessment, they have the formative Exit Tickets that help them prescribe instruction along the way and help prevent misconceptions or gaps in knowledge.

Third Grade Exit Ticket Example:

During a unit of study on developing and understanding fractions and fraction equivalence, students needed to be able to use models to represent equivalent fractions and identify representations of equivalence. To get started, we had students work with pattern blocks. They identified the yellow hexagon as one whole, a red trapezoid as ½, a blue rhombus as 1/3, and a green triangle as 1/6. They created equations like ½ + ½ = 1, 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1, and 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 = 1.

Additionally, we taught students to find ways to make one whole using combinations of halves, thirds, and sixths with pattern blocks as their tool and write equations. For example, ½ + 1/3 + 1/6 = 1.

Students quickly began to find equivalent fractions like ½=3/6, 1/3 = 2/6, and 2/3 = 4/6, and make generalizations like, all fractions that contain denominators twice as large as the numerator are equivalent to ½.

After several lessons, we played a game in which students received a recording sheet of yellow hexagons. Students rolled a fraction die and had to add that fractional piece to one of the yellow hexagon pieces. The object of the game was to fill in all their yellow hexagons.

During the two days of lessons using the pattern block manipulatives much of our discussion was in student pairs. We weren’t confident that every student had transferred our classroom conversation to independent mastery, so we used an Exit Ticket at the end of Math Workshop on Day 2 to formatively assess students. The students were given three minutes to complete the task and then we collected their work. In the first problem, students had to write an equivalent fraction for 3/3, 3/6, and 2/6, and in question number two they had to answer the following question, William had a fraction cookie with the equation ½ + 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6. Sebatian told William that he could just write ½ + 3/6 or ½ + ½. Is Sebastian right? Explain.

Within minutes, we had sorted the students’ work. Some students easily, accurately, and articulately answered the questions and needed no further instruction. Some students answered the questions correctly but their explanation of the equivalencies was not articulate enough to know whether they fully understood the concept. These students would need a quick conference to identify whether they fully mastered the concepts. In some cases, we found that no further instruction was needed, but in other cases, we found that there is a gap in knowledge and small group instruction is needed for mastery. The third group of students could not accurately answer the questions and we formed a small instructional group to offer more instruction and practice.

When I first heard the idea of an Exit Ticket, I jumped too quickly to the conclusion that I would gain the same information from a quiz or assessment. But, after implementing them on a trial basis consistently for several weeks, I realized that they had tremendous value for gathering data and giving immediate and consistent feedback to students. It was the difference between assessing with a summative (a quiz or test) and a formative which helps guides the next day’s lesson. I would recommend the use of Exit Tickets to any math teacher who is serious about offering differentiated math instruction to meet the needs of each of their students.

A Few New Math Ideas

A colleague and I facilitated math training for teachers in Texas in mid-February. Each training day included lesson pre-briefing and planning, a classroom math observation, and a debrief of the lesson afterward. Teachers made rich connections, gained new ideas for their instructional practice, and gained a deeper understanding of a Math Investigations unit of study. Though my main focus was on the learning of the teacher participants, I also couldn’t help but take away a few reflections of my own.

Archiving Student Work

The classrooms we visited do a stellar job of archiving students’ math work. Each student has a composition notebook with a Table of Contents in the front. The pages of the composition notebook are numbered and each day the teacher has students add the date, math title, and pages of the journal they've consumed. We could easily turn to the pages listed in the Table of Contents to see what work the student had done for that day. In the notebook, they may solve a problem, explain a solution, do an extension activity, or answer an essential question during their Closing Meeting. Providing a great way for students to reflect and a resource for studying for assessments, I loved the possibilities of this tool.

Extension Activities

At Chets Creek, we use standards to write yearly pacing guides, plan instruction, and assess students. In making our work transparent, students become familiar with the standards we expect them to master. Many times the way a teacher implements this best practice is by having an essential question, written in standards language, posted on the board. In their math lesson they go over the essential question which students revisit and answer in their Closing Meeting. At NISD, I noticed that not only did the teachers write the essential question for the day, but they also had an extension activity written next to the essential question. When some of the students finished early on their task, they didn’t say, “I’m done! What now?” instead they got to work on the extension question. What an easy way to extend student learning!

Visual Word Walls

There was one math word wall in particular that caught my eye. Instead of the word wall simply being a list of terms the students are expected to know, this word wall offered a great visual reference for remembering geometry vocabulary. This model math word wall sets the standard that we should all being striving toward.

Skip Counting on the Number Line

Number lines are a permanent artifact in our math classrooms, however this number line included colored dots that are used for the students use in skip counting. For example, if a student followed the red dots, they could easily skip count by twos, and if they read the yellow dots, they would be skip counting by fives, etc... I could easily see this as a great tool in elementary classrooms, especially in K-3rd grade. Afterall, skip counting/repeated addition is the foundational element in multiplication.

Walking into another teacher's classroom offers so much opportunity for gleaming new ideas. Whether you do it in your own building, like our Kindergarten teachers did two weeks ago, or in another school, you gain so little without consuming too much of your time or energy, and gathering just a few new ideas leaves you with a wealth of new knowledge over time. I can't wait to see if any of these new ideas are embraced at CCE. Stay tuned...

What Motivates Us?

As a Florida educator, my life's work has been dedicated toward providing children with a quality education in which to build a prosperous life full of options. As a classroom inclusion teacher, I worked tirelessly with each of my students, regardless of their exceptionally, socio- economic situation, or home life to reach their fullest potential. And, as a current Instructional Coach, I dedicate my time toward guiding professional growth and learning amongst our nearly 90 teachers to improve classroom practice and student achievement. My work and that of my colleagues matters. In fact, it may be the most important thing we ever do.


The fire that was ignited in me as a young teacher still burns strongly. I continue to think that anything can be changed and decisions in the best interest of students and teachers will prevail. Some are cynical, they have lost hope, but in the interest of my own two boys and the thousands of children that walk through our school doors each year, I simply can't and won't give up. Maybe, I'm acting like a cornered pitbull ready to fight, but I have hope for the future of public school education in Florida.

I don't move with a blindly optimistic attitude toward the future. I will admit that I'm fearful of poor decisions left in the hand of politicians which could cripple our profession. The writing appears to be on the wall with Senate Bill 6. Legislators without any classroom experience, never walking a mile in our shoes, will likely make a decision this year that will push the best, brightest, and most noble out of our profession. The bill erases teachers' pay on years of experience and advance degrees, and proposes to pay teachers based on their students' state test scores collected in just a few days of the 180 they are in attendance. Wanting to hold teachers fully accountable for their students learning, they overlook circumstances beyond our control.

Merit pay would rid the profession not of the poor teachers but of the exceptional ones. Some who serve our neediest learners, our learning disabled children, our non-English speaking students. Teachers who tutor on their own time, offer Tiered Interventions at every turn, buy classroom supplies when the schools can't afford to supply them, and spend hours upon hours on weeknights and weekends planning quality lessons. These are the teachers that will be most frustrated and dishonored.

For the past thirteen years, I've been serving at Chets Creek, and some of our most amazing teachers never receive the small portion of merit pay that is currently passed out. dayle timmons, a life-long Special Education teacher and 2004 Florida Teacher of the Year has never qualified for merit pay. The current merit pay system is broken and unfair. Senate Bill 6 will only escalate and intensify the problems. Educators see the glaring flaws; Senate Bill 6 may destroy the Florida teaching profession.

I work in a school with transcendent purpose and complete collegiality; We set out each and every day to change the world, one child at a time, having no doubt that we can and will achieve our goals. Embracing every child regardless of their circumstances is our moral calling, and we have the creative and innovative teachers, that with the right level of support, can reach them all. A learning organization led by a principal who implicitly trusts her teachers as professionals and gives them the autonomy needed to produce impressive qualitative and quantitative results. Just looking at our state test scores only marginally gives you a picture of who we are and what our teachers and children can achieve. Looking five years down the road, I wonder if this will be the same learning community utopia of today. It seems like our funds are drying up and our hands are being tied. Will a school like mine, full of passionate dedicated and exceptional teachers, be here for the unborn child of my principal? Or, instead will the best and brightest flee local private schools or other professions?

Politicians pass laws every year, they claim to base decisions on research. I'm wondering whether they would be supporting Senate Bill 6 if they watched this Daniel Pink video which highlights the conclusions of studies done by economists and psychologists who explain, "When the profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen." If you really want to make a change in an organization, pay people enough to take money off the table. When money is off the table that is when people can think about the work. The research shows that the best results are achieved by people who are motivated, and what they are motivated by are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Our Florida children deserve teachers who are motivated to improve student achievement by these motivations. Merit pay will not promote the collegiality our profession needs to make significant improvements.

This video is worth every minute and I hope you will leave me a comment with your thoughts or connections.

Developing Young Mathematicians

As an educator, my math classroom is significantly different from the one in which I was raised. I think many of our students’ parents feel the same way. In fact, during conferences, I’ve had several parents proclaim, “That’s not how I learned math.” To reassure them, I’ve explained my perspective as an educator and a parent. Many times, the explanation starts at the beginning-what they know to be true about their own math experiences.

Rewind twenty-five years to the math classrooms of my youth and most likely theirs; Situated neatly in rows, desks faced the front of the room. A math textbook lay open. On the left side of the page, there were step by step procedures for solving problems, and on the right page 25 or 30 practice problems with one or two word problems at the bottom. The teacher’s lesson began by working out the practice problem step by step while the students watched and memorized the procedures. Our task during class was to mimic perfectly the procedure and to work out the other practice problems independently. At the end of the period, we would pass our papers to the front of the room for the teacher to assess our progress.

I was a good math student, always able to follow the teacher’s directions and mimic the procedures. And, it didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t even need to read the word problems at the bottom of the page, I just needed to pull the numbers out of the paragraph and use the same procedure for solving.

Does this scene sound familiar? It’s the way most of today’s teachers and our students' parents were taught math. Fortunately, it’s not the way our children are learning. Instead, based on research like TIMSS (Trends in International Math and Science Studies), and teachers’ professional development through organizations like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, educators are learning to better prepare students to think mathematically.

Thirteen years ago, as a beginning teacher, I learned about this shift in math teaching and learning at a national conference. Phil Daro, a Senior Fellow of Mathematics, helped me understand the need for change as he explained the three-pronged math approach . A conversation that I’ve replicated with parents and colleagues throughout the years. He began by drawing a triangle on the board and printing the word SKILLS at the top. Then, continued by creating the mental image of the typical classroom of my youth. Teaching and learning, decades ago, was focused on skills as the top and sometimes only priority. All too often concepts and problem solving were omitted, creating a deficiency that students struggled to overcome as they moved on to more advanced mathematics.

To illustrate how to prevent a gap in mathematical knowledge, and create a well rounded math student, Daro drew another triangle rotated 180⁰ so concepts and problem solving were now on top. Daro explained that math is three-pronged and, “Teachers must teach for conceptual understanding, build problem-solving skills, and strengthen basic skills.” Urging educators to tip the triangle upside down and select curriculum tools with an emphasis on concepts and problem solving, and then embed skills was the way to improve math instruction he assured. The connection I made to his simple explanation was immediate; Classrooms of my youth were skill driven classrooms; I didn’t learn to understand or connect concepts, generalize my learning, or problem solve. I learned to imitate my teacher. In that moment, I vowed, as a math educator, to teach my students to think mathematically, and as a parent I committed to helping other parents understand the need for this shift.

To accomplish my goal in the classroom, I piloted a conceptually based math curriculum tool, implemented internationally benchmarked math standards along with my state standards, and embraced the three-pronged approach using a sixty minute Math Workshop format and a fifteen minute Interactive Math Skills Block. Confidently, I set forth to create a culture of student collaboration and dialogue. Growing competent and fluent young mathematicians, who understood concepts, could strategically and flexibly approach problems, were procedurally fluent, and could articulate and justify their answers captured my full attention. And, trust me when I say, teaching myself to learn in this fashion was exhausting; There were days when I was only minutes ahead of my students’ learning. However, in the end, I captured the most amazing rewards. I, with the assistance of a few colleagues, helped paved the way for my peers by creating a shift in our practice.

Now, over a decade later, this passion still consumes much of my time and provides me with just as much satisfaction. Currently, as a staff developer, I chair our Math Council to lead with our vision and mission in constant view and assist to grow math leadership capacity in others. At the same time, I embrace my role to get new math teachers started on the right path from the very beginning. I continue to share my story with anyone who will listen. After all, I have the unique pleasure of teaching children and teachers to think mathematically.