Lesson Review Form 5

ECED 329 Teacher Candidate: Mackenzie Areheart Lesson Topic: Fractions: Halves Date of the Lesson: 4/8/13

Todays Date: 4/10/13

1.State one objective and describe the ways in which your students met that objective. My objective for this lesson was when given a cookie (circle), a chocolate bar (rectangle), and an activity sheet, the students will be able to divide each shape into equal halves by dividing it on paper and labeling each half with the correct fraction. All but one student participated in the lesson. The rest of the students participated and divided their real chocolate bar and cookie in half and also the ones on their papers, labeling the halves as well. Two students divided their cookie and chocolate bar wrong. The majority of the students met the objective and about half the class even went beyond that by correctly dividing a rectangle into four parts and labeling its parts with the correct fractions. 2. Describe how you sequenced the lesson so that your students were guided from their known experiences to new learnings. The students had just finished a unit on geometry before I taught my lesson where they had covered dividing shapes into two equal parts. The pre-assessment required that they divide a circle into two equal parts, and then label each part with the correct fraction. Almost all of the students could divide the circle into equal parts because they had been exposed to it before, but none of the students correctly labeled the halves with fractions. The students had never been exposed to fractions before. I started my lesson with a read-aloud that explained fractions and connected fractions to real life by naming foods and other objects that could be divided into equal halves. These were foods and objects they all shouldve been familiar with. I had the kids close their eyes and imagine the different foods in the story being cut into two equal parts. When the kids came to sit down for the read-aloud I had them sit half on one side and half on the other. After the read-aloud I explained that they were a fraction! I modeled for the students how to divide both a circle and a rectangle into equal halves. I then explained how to write a fraction and

label the halves. Next the students had an opportunity to come up to the smart board and divide real-life objects into equal halves and label the sides to apply what I had just modeled for them. Then, I gave each child a chocolate bar, cookie, and an activity sheet where they got to hold and use real life objects to make fractions and divide them on the paper and label them. At the end of my lesson I gave them a challenge to see if they could apply what I had taught them to the concept of fourths. I had the children draw a rectangle, divide the rectangle into four equal parts, and label the parts with fractions. 3. Describe the kind(s) of groupings you used and the effectiveness of your use of grouping. My lesson was taught in a whole group setting, and the students also got a chance to work individually while still talking with the people beside them. Whole group was the most effective for teaching my lesson because it allowed me use the class fraction demonstration after the read-aloud. I divided the carpet in half with tape and had half the students sit on one side and the other half sit on the other. After reading the readaloud, I told the students that they were a fraction. The class was the whole, and they were equally divided in half. I let each of the kids have their own chocolate bar and cookie, and this was most effective because I wanted them to each be able to hold and break their own cookie and chocolate bar. This allowed me to see what individuals were capable of. 4. Describe one way in which you addressed the individual needs of one child or a small group of children. Due to the age of my students they have trouble sitting still for long periods of time so within my thirty minute lesson I made sure that there were lots of activities and that they didnt have to sit still for long. There were many smaller parts to my lesson and each part lasted a short period of time. Within the thirty minute lesson I did a read-aloud, a class demonstration of a fraction, activity on the smartboard, chocolate bar and cookie activity, and a video. In order to make sure the above average students were being challenged I gave all the students a challenge question. After we had completed the activity sheet I had the students turn their papers over and draw a rectangle. Then I told them to divide their rectangle into four equal parts and label each part of the rectangle with a fraction. 5. If your management of the lesson presented difficulties, what were they and how did you handle them?

I thought the lesson went very smoothly, and the students caught on to fractions way better than I thought they would. The children seem to enjoy using the chocolate bars and cookies to make fractions. Before the lesson I was concerned that the children would have difficulty dividing them into equal halves because the cookies and chocolate bars would break, but the students did pretty well breaking their chocolate and cookies in half. A few kids broke their cookies into unequal parts, but they understood the concept that they were supposed to be equal halves. 6. Describe your assessment process and the ways in which the process provided/did not provide you with an accurate evaluation of how well the children learned the content. In order to pre-assess the students, I gave each child a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it and asked them to divide the circle into two equal parts. Then, I asked them to label each half of the circle with the correct fraction. The students had just finished a unit on geometry where they learned their shapes and were exposed to dividing shapes into equal parts. The new information that I would be presenting would be fractions, and the students had never been exposed to fractions before. This pre-assessment showed me that the students understood what two equal parts looked like but that they didnt know how to write a fraction. All of the students needed opportunities to practice with writing fractions and to continue applying the concept of dividing objects into equal halves. During the smart board activity I took notes on how the students did when they had an opportunity to divide real life objects into two equal parts or write the fractions for the parts on the smart board. All the students divided and labeled the shapes correctly during this activity. This showed that the students could divide circular and rectangular objects into equal halves and write the fraction for each half. In order to post-assess the students I gave each child a chocolate bar, cookie, and an activity sheet. The students had to equally divide the real life chocolate bar and cookie in half and also the Hershey bar and cookie on their activity sheets. Then, they had to label the equal parts with fractions on the activity sheet. From looking at the pre-assessment and post-assessment it is obvious that the students now have more knowledge of fractions than they did before the lesson was taught. In order to take learning further, after the post-assessment I gave the students a challenge question where they had to draw a rectangle, divide it into four equal parts, and label each part with the correct fraction. Nine students were able to apply what they learned about fractions to label the four equal parts of the rectangle each with the fraction 1/4 .

7. Describe the manner in which your lesson addressed more than one of the developmental realms of the child. This lesson addressed the cognitive development of the students. The students were required to pull on prior knowledge of dividing shapes into equal parts in order to complete this lesson. The children also had to be able to close their eyes and imagine shapes. They had to be able to recognize that there are shapes in the environment and that they can make those shapes into fractions. The children also used cognitive development as they applied what they learned to the challenge question to further their learning. This lesson addressed physical development as well as the students had to use their fine motor skills to break the cookie and chocolate bar into halves. 8. Identify the dimension of multicultural education (i.e., James Banks notion of content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, or empowering school culture) that was most critical for you to consider as you taught this lesson. Why do you believe that your chosen dimension was the most important for this learning experience? This lesson briefly touched on the idea of content integration. The integration of subjects is becoming more and more common, and in this particular lesson I was able integrate reading into math by reading a read-aloud to the students about fractions. 9. When you teach your next lesson, what teaching strategy will you work to improve? I need to continue to work on making sure that my lessons are easily understood by the students and that I am doing everything that I can to explain concepts in multiple ways. When I was doing the activity on the smart board where I taught them how to write the fraction for each half I just used the outline of a circle and the circle was not colored in. In order to better explain that the top number of a fraction is the part of the whole that you are looking at I couldve colored one half one color and one half another color. This lesson had multiple components to it, but I need to continually develop my ability to plan several ways to teach a concept. 10. How would you rate your implementation of this lesson? Very Good Satisfactory Fair

Why would you rate your lesson this way?

My assessment data shows that a lot of learning took place during my lesson. The students seemed to be very excited about learning a new concept, and they really caught on to fractions as I was teaching them. This lesson went very good because of all the learning that took place. I was so excited to see the students excited over something new and really understanding how to do it.