The ImagineIT project is for 5th grade math students at Joseph Kellman Corporate Community School. The school is located in the North Lawndale community, student population is predominantly African American, and students come from various backgrounds. Each grade level has access to a computer cart that they share with their partner teacher. The students also has a technology class at least once per week.
This will be my sixth year teaching at Kellman. I taught third grade for four years, fourth grade one year, and I also taught departmental math for 3rd through 5th grade before classes were changed back to self-contained classrooms. This will be my first year teaching middle school math for 6th grade math. I chose to focus on the two 5th grade math classes because I will be learning new curriculum for the 6th graders. I don’t want to add more stress with too many new things. If it appears to be overwhelming with the changes this year I will narrow it down to one class.
My amazing Big Idea is about building communities through mathematics. My vision is seeing my classroom collaborate in groups implementing TPACK with a focus on math content. Changing students fixed mindset about mathematics by using actionable steps to bring growth mindset into the classroom (Growth Mindset Article)..Building the community includes teaching social emotional learning components to help build sharing and caring, teamwork, respect for self and others, conflict resolution, and learning about support systems. The groups will move on to build outside the classroom into the school community with a staff person or student from another classroom working on real life math problems that include simple and digital technology. I will utilize the simple technology around the classroom (construction paper, sticks, stickers, pencils, play dooh, etc.) that I never thought to used until my experience with MSUrban STEM. Students have access to Ipads as well so we can take pictures and create videos. Through building the school community, I would like to see the students share their knowledge and understanding with others while incorporating the social skills they will learn with their groups in the classroom. Students will form groups and partner with a person in the neighborhood or a family member sharing their math idea and develop a real life math project. Student will have a choice to present their year long project in book form or video.
The student groups in the classroom will meet at least twice per week building leadership and teamwork skills by working on a common mathematical problem and sharing with one another on how to solve them. The school community partnership will begin during the second semester and these teams will meet bi-monthly helping a student in a lower grade build on their math strategies or as a meeting for enrichment for a challenge. The community partnerships will begin in third quarters and build on using their math strategies as it relates to the career of the community partner.
The fifth grade broad math standards include operations and algebraic thinking, numbers and operations base ten, numbers and operations fractions, measurement and data, and geometry. There will be focus on analyzing patterns and relationships, why decimals are important in the real world, relationships between whole numbers and fractions using different operations, the importance of measurement conversion, and understanding concepts of volume. I will use the interactive digital videos, Kahoot, story problem role play, scavenger hunts, and creative videos. I would like to do some field trips to make some math connections prior to the final project. They will work with their community partners on math in relationship to their partner's career. For instance, I have a friend that is willing to be a partner and she owns a hair salon. They could work with her own using math to calculate how much she spends on products per month and share math strategies with her that she may be unaware of and together they can create a presentation using digital technology or other simple technology. The integrations of technology, content, and pedagogy will change my teaching style throughout this year. I look forward to becoming an innovative educator and growing through the process. My deep play group is studying project based learning and that is the pedagogical approach I will implement. TPACK will change the way I assess the students instead of the formative assessment being paper and pencil. I must create new rubrics and how I evaluate understanding. I look forward to seeing my Big Idea come alive!