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These are notes from the trainings and work in 2012-13!

E. St. Louis District 189 Teachers

We have been working in teams to begin the transition to the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.  Teachers in each grade level have begun a pacing guide.  The pacing guide includes the time frame, Big ideas, Common Core Math Standards of Content and Practices.  The notes section is for teachers to record notes on the lessons and activities.

Resources are listed to the right.  Remember to click on the CCSS Math link above for lessons, tasks, videos for the Common Core.

February 2013 Training Notes - Download the Standards PPT here. Remember to focus on the math, compare strategies, and stay away from teaching story problems using key words!

Kindergarten - During out grade level meetings, teachers learned the structure of the Common Core Standards with two sets of standards - content and practices. Content standards are organized into Domains, Clusters, and Standards and require greater depth of less topics. Teachers will work on Number Talks and number activities from the curriculum focusing on subitizing and conservation of numbers.

1st & 2nd grade - Reviewed the Common Core Standards (link for PPT above). Teachers worked through several number talk problems, using strategies of breaking up the numbers into place value components, making tens (base 10 units), making friendly numbers, using doubles, and compensation. We discovered compensation for addition is NOT the same structure for subtraction.

The Common Core Standards call for teaching operations through strategies, properties of operations and the relationship between operations, not starting with algorithms.  We categorized the facts that make 12 according to strategies and properties.

First grade fluency standards focus on 1.OA.C.6 Add and subtract within 20 using strategies of making tens, doubles, friendly numbers, and inverse operations. Second grade will complete add and subtract within 20 using mental strategies, and fluently add and subtract within 100 using related strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and relationship between addition and subtraction.

We also focused on story problems.  Remember page 88 of the Common Core Standards provides an overview of the story situations. Kindergarten are to master the Add to, Take From Result Unknown problems, as well as the Put Together/Take Apart Total Unknown and Both Addens Unknown problems. First and second grade will continue with the remaining problems. First grade should master the Add to, Take From Change Unknown; Put Together/Take Apart Addend Unknown, and Comparison problems, with 2nd grade mastering the remaining table. We worked on showing solving these problems with the tape diagrams. 

Grades 3-5 - Strategies for mulitplication are important to teach to reach to mastery.  Third graders need to master their single digit mulitplication facts by the end of the grade.  The Common Core Standards call for teaching operations through strategies, properties of operations and the relationship between operations, not starting with algorithms.  The goal is to compare strategies so students see what method is most efficient. In addition, the number line and areas models are tools to help students understand the mathematics.


We worked on building a multiplication chart using strategies and coding.  Times Table - is a Excel workbook with different sheets to help students learn the strategies for multiplication. 
One is to fill in the multiplication table.  This is to be used with the Strategies sheet. Students record the strategies and how many facts that relates to. This activity is to show students that there are not 169 facts to memorize, but much less when we learn our strategies.

50 Fact Times Drill - Students do not worry about how many, but practice using the strategies to complete this timed drill.  There are one minute and three minute sections on this drill.  One
minute must follow down the columns sequentially with no skipping.  Then students switch to a different color pen or pencil.  They now have 3 minutes to hop around and use their strategies to answers problems. It is most important to have student write what facts they know and what facts they need to work with.

We also worked solving problems with tape diagrams.  The Common Core page 89 has the mulitplication and division word problems that need to be mastered.  Third grade works with equal groups of objects and arrays.  The 4th and 5th finish mastery of this table.

6-8 Grades - We worked on several number talks.  The ideas is to choose problems that promote using strategies and properties of operations int he content that you are teaching.  We had an example of finding a supplementary angle if one angle was 84 degrees. We worked on several strategies of making base ten units.  The goal is to compare strategies so students see what method is most  efficient. We proved that compensation for addition does not work for subtraction.  In addition, the number line and areas models are tools to help students understand the mathematics.

We worked on a semantic map of operations.  I included a beginning one for exponents we have used in other schools.  Here is the example.

We spent time on story problems. The Common Core Glossary on page 88 and 89 contains the problem situations that students should master by the end of 5th grade. Tape diagrams are an appropriate tool to help students visualize the problem. We worked on several ratio and algebra problems.  Several people had questions about the problem below.
        
Three years ago, a man was 5 times as old as his son, but in 2 years time, he will be only 3 times as old as his son.  How old is each of them? 

Here is my solution.  Feel free to send me a comment at cathy.integrated@bluetie.com. 

Resources
The Common Core State Standards for
Mathematics
-
please save this link in your
favorites, download the documents, or print it in a
binder.
 
Tasks from the Illustrative Mathematics site formatted in Word. These are the cards we sorted into grade levels. Middle
& High School tasks click
here
. Here are tasks for K-5 Operations and Algebraic Thinking Tasks and
Number and Operations/Fraction and Operations Tasks

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