Journal+2_Erin

Erin Goulart Journal Assessment assignment #2 Last week, I went to my placement on both Thursday and Friday which actually helped me with observing the assessment taking place. On Thursday the class normally continues working on the writing or math lessons of the week and then Friday is their assessment day,(like I always remembered in school as well). On Thursday, the 5th grade teacher Mrs. M switched with my cooperating teachers position for a lesson on math for a particular scheduling reason. During her lesson with the students, she went over fractions and how to assort them in arrays. She modeled a lot of problems and scenarios on the board, and then the students got a worksheet to work on. Several hands shot up during the worksheet, and even the ones that didn’t, I walked around and continuously saw mistakes being made. The class had been working on these fractions all week, and it was made clear that more time needed to be spent on this with them. I helped as many students as possible, even stopping the class and going over the worksheet as well. The teacher and I both tried to re-state that the denominator was the amount of groups that the array will be broken into. As much as the students nodded their head and seemed to say they understood, their progress on their worksheets didn’t match up. We both spent a lot of time weeding out individuals in the classroom and showing them where they went wrong, and why they did this. The next day during my visitation, I walked around as the students took the fraction assessment. I saw the same students making the same mistakes and I knew they just weren’t taking the time to count correctly, with simple mistakes, or they were getting stuck with making arrays evenly. This stood out to me as a major problem, because in the steps, the first thing to do would be drawing an array with X number of blocks in it. Because many of the students had a hard time with their multiplication tables, it was hard for them to even draw an array. This was stopping many of them on continuing on the process that they knew how to do. This assessment showed me how important it is to go through the stages with a class until they get it as a whole. I knew this, but now that I was able to go and see the mistakes they were making and knowing their struggles, its important to know that further assessment on things such as fractions is necessary, yes, but if a crew of the class cannot yet grasp their multiplication tables, it can throw them all off in this lesson and cause them to struggle from the very beginning over it.