Student Understanding Reflection

910 Words4 Pages
I develop student understanding in clip 1 by pushing students to engage with one another in order to recognize that there can only be two halves in one whole, regardless of some tricky wording in the application problem. At Clip 1 3:53, I ask students, “How many halves are in one whole?” Students respond “2”, so I use that prior knowledge of two halves being in one whole to develop understanding of not being able to split one whole into three equal halves. I draw three representations of people on the smart board followed by one whole split up into two halves at Clip 1 4:02. During this time, students are engaged in looking at the model that they drew before our class discussion and are trying to readjust their model based on what we are discussing.…show more content…
One of my students is working on a problem involving shaded and unshaded fractions, which we studied in lesson 1. He surprisingly comes up with the correct answer without actually understanding what he was doing. He was thinking about a “unit fraction” being the amount unshaded in a figure. And in the first problem, one equal part happened to be unshaded, and he put “1/8” as the unit fraction even though he was misremembering what a unit fraction was. At Clip 2 1:20, I ask him to think back to previous learning and define what a unit fraction is. Although he is a new English speaker, he is able to conceptualize that a unit fraction is the total number of equal parts in a whole. He does not use perfect academic language, but gets the point across that he knows what the vocabulary means. He then uses that knowledge to understand the mathematical concept of counting unit fractions in multiple wholes. He is able to grasp the unit fraction, and then use that information to solve for fifteen eighths being shaded instead of fifteen sixteenths, because he understood that the unit fraction was the total number of equal parts in one whole, not two or more…show more content…
My students in general have very large families and they are consistently discussing how they share their toys with their brothers and sisters. This background knowledge of sharing each other’s toys relates to this problem and ties into the idea of “fairness” that my students are very attuned to. They would never want something to be unfair, especially amongst their family, and this problem provides a real world example of fairness within families involving something they are passionate

More about Student Understanding Reflection

Open Document