Tuesday's Teachings - Adding & Subtracting Fractions with Uncommon Denominators

Back to teaching on Tuesday. It is always so nice to get back into the "room" with the students. They really enjoy our time together and I think this helps them and the parents with the lessons they are covering at home.

Since my classroom is quite different from the "normal" brick and mortar room, completing the time on task needed to be interpreted creatively. After reviewing the chart, I have really taken to noticing the tasks we are working on, if any one is off task (in this case that usually means randon chatting in the chat window instead of paying attention to the lesson), how is this managed, who am I calling on to answer the questions, and what interventions have I taken.

I cannot use proximity since I am not physically in the room, but what I can and do often use are my words. For example, during today's lesson one student what totally off track and typing away in the chat window (she only has priviledges to chat with me) about anything but Math. I reminded her ", you want to really make sure you are following what we are working on since we are going to be putting this into practice with some problems." She responded she was paying attention; however, no more than a few minutes later when we worked on a problem I noticed she had no idea what we were doing. I may need to contact mom and mention she is really viewing these sessions more as social time rather than learning time. The other students have really come to learn and I do not have issues with any of them being off task. In fact, they will tell me "Mrs. Bauer, I don't get it." I then ask them to be more specific about what they are struggling with and we work on it together as a class since I am sure others have the same question but didn't ask it.

If I needed to evaluate where I am considering my Classroom Managemnt and Organization, I would say I am a Professional who is working towards Mastery. I feel there is always room to grow even if you are at the top, but I know I am not there yet.

Today's lessons dealt with adding and subtracting fractions with uncommon denominators. The students really seemed to understand and like I said if they didn't they would ask. We reviewed vocabulary - denominator, numerator, common (from last weeks lesson), multiple, least, operation (in math terms), special form of one (1/1, 2/2. 3/3, etv.). I always feel reviewing the vocabulary will help them as they see these words in books and on the tests they take.

After reviewing the vocabulary, we moved on to working on finding the LCM (lowest common multiple). I reminded them this was skip couting with that number such as 2, 4, 6, 8 . . . or 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 . . .. I strongly suggested they write this out so they can easily seem what the LCM is. We practiced this quite a bit since they did seem to struggle with it (the same person wanted to answer so I knew it was time to really go over this deeply). Once this seemed to be something they understood, we moved on to using the special form of 1 to get an equivalent fraction so they would both have the same denominator. When this is accomplished, the adding and subtracting seems easy for them - denominator stays the same as the LCM and you simply add (or subtract) the numerator. This also allows me the opportunity to reinforce how important it is to know in your head the multiplication facts since we use these to determine the equivalent fraction. At the very end, I showed them how we can use what we just learned and challenge ourselves to work with mixed numbers. This will be Wednesday's 11AM class - working with adding and subtracting Mixed Numbers. Hopefully, they have remembered what we worked on earlier since this will really help them with this lesson.

I'll let you know how adding and subtracting Mixed Numbers goes Wednesday afternoon. LATER!