tangrams

This past week we had fun with yet another completely engaging math lesson - firing cotton ball "frogs" from paper clip launchers, then tracking the absolute and linear distances they traveled. While this way of teaching about distance was both fun and new to me, what I really appreciated about last week's class was learning how to use tangrams. I'd never worked with them before and knew nothing about them. In class, we used a set of tangrams to create a giraffe figure, then tried to construct a giraffe twice the size with multiple sets. This was not easy!

As I mentioned above, I'd never used tangrams before this class, and one question I have is about other classroom applications. They seem to do a good job of fostering spatial thinking. Do they have any applications at the 4th grade level? I'm wondering about a use that might help my main placement kids remember geometric shapes and their properties. Since the tangrams are geometric shapes they've studied, it might be a useful way to use them in my classroom.

The implications for classroom practice that I see are more engaging ways to get kids to connect to math. The exercise of doubling the size of the giraffe was very challenging -- my group never got there, in fact -- but was also very engrossing, no one wanted to stop trying!

moving from assessment to instruction

Over the past few weeks I've learned a bit about my buddy's needs, abilities, and interests. My buddy, whom I'll continue to call Katie, seems to genuinely enjoy reading. She particularly enjoys her reading textbook. During one of our informal reading conferences she neatly summarized what had been happening in one of the stories, highlighting both explicit and implicit details. For instance, she inferred why the main character, Maria Isabel Salazar Lopez, disliked being called Mary Lopez, a conclusion supported, but not directly stated, by the story. Katie's comprehension of the two assessment readings, Amelia Earhart and Early Railroads, was fairly good. She did miss some explicit supporting details, such as the sentence that told the reader who Tom Thumb was in the Early Railroads piece. This affected her comprehension of the analogy being made between the engine and Tom Thumb, and she stumbled on the comprehension questions that dealt with that analogy.

Additionally, Katie's reading of the assessment pieces was slower than average. She read Early Railroads at 93 words per minute - nearly 20 words per minute slower than an "average" 4th grade peer. In all her reading aloud for me, however, I noted a particular difficulty with names that really slows her down. Katie had a bit of trouble with the name Tom Thumb in Early Railroads and it almost felt like the name was a bit of a tongue twister for her. It took her a while to move on with the reading. At other times, though, Katie will elide an unknown word. That said, Katie generally reads in larger, meaningful chunks, until she gets to a section that trips her up. Occasionally she missed punctuation, too. Katie had 12 miscues during her reading of Early Railroads, which indicates that the text is at instructional level for her.

Given the results of the reading assessments and my findings during our informal reading conferences, I would say that Katie is at level 3 on the NAEP Oral Reading Fluency Scale. Katie sometimes read with meaning, but at other times read inexpressively and missed punctuation and phrasing. Although she sometimes read larger phrase groups with correct expression for long stretches, these stretches were punctuated by shorter word groupings and groupings that missed words and/or punctuation. She might be just a bit higher than a 3 with an instructional text.

Overall, I think Katie needs work on fluency. While fairly good, her comprehension would improve if she had better fluency. This week, I plan to have Katie read the level 3 texts.