DANIELLE'S PERSONAL LEARNING PATH

I have been dreading tackling this topic and thought about skipping it all together, but then I realized that's the point of this project! Fractions were one of my least favorite math topics in elementary school, and even today I'm not a big fan of teaching lessons on them. So I'm dedicating this post to doing some research and finding fun, creative ways to get kids (and myself) excited about fractions! So first let's start off by simply defining what a fraction is. A fraction is a PART of a WHOLE. The numerator, or top number, is how many parts we have. The denominator, or the bottom number, is how many parts the whole is divided into. PIZZA TIMEEEEEE! So here, my NUMERATOR is the number of parts, or pieces, that I have. My DENOMINATOR is the number of parts the whole pizza is broken into. The third pizza was cut into 8 pieces, and there are 3 pieces left. So there's 3/8 of the pizza left! While pizza is a great example, obviously your students will nee

We're going to be talking about perimeter for this week's post, and let me tell ya, perimeter was one of my favorite math concepts as a kid. Math was a tougher subject for me that I often had trouble staying invested in, but my 3rd grade teacher made perimeter such a fun unit that I still remember it to this day! We'll start off by reviewing perimeter. Where I think area can be a tricky concept for some kids between the multiplication and knowing which numbers to use, perimeter is a pretty straightforward formula. All you need to do is add up the length of all the sides and voila! You've calculated the perimeter! In 3rd grade, we built a vegetable garden by the playground at my school to end our unit on perimeter. It was such a cooperative, hands-on activity that everyone was so excited about and it's one of the few lessons I can clearly remember from elementary school. We started by choosing a few vegetables to plant and then began mapping out the garden. Our

As promised in my last post (for all my loyal readers), I'm going to build off of last weeks topic and move on to......AREA! Area is a 3rd grade standard, but as you guys (maybe) saw in my last post, students get a chance to explore the basics of area in 2nd grade! In 2nd grade, they begin partitioning rectangles into same-size boxes. As I've seen in many classrooms, area is taught first by showing students that you can count the boxes inside the shape to determine how the area, AKA how many boxes there are. As students solidify their conceptual understanding of what area represents, they begin to see shapes with labeled sides. Students learn to understand that the length and width is the same on opposite sides, and practice partitioning the shapes themselves and finding the area. Finally, students are given labeled sides and learn that they can multiply in order to find the area (AREA = LENGTH x WIDTH). There are many different activities that can help students deepen their