Come See Me!

I have an exciting Spring planned.  Besides all my regular fun things, March 15 will be my first time presenting at ASCD in Los Angeles.  March 22-29 is my trip to Singapore!  I'm beyond excited.  I promise to post everyday about what I see and what I learn.  I already have two days scheduled in classrooms, thanks to Char Forsten.  Eliza Thomas, another fabulous SDE presenter will be joining me.

Shortly after my return,  I'll be presenting a session on Fraction Games at NCTM in New Orleans in April.  NCTM is always an exciting time to learn, shop, and see what's coming.  I know Kristin Hilty is also presenting there this year.

July is the National Conference on Singapore Math.  I'm so excited about this year's conference.  Dr. Yeap Ban Har is doing a full day on whole numbers this year.  Marcy Cook is presenting sessions on critical thinking and reasoning (all aligned to CCSS!), and Jasmine Kho is coming from Singapore to teach us about lesson planning and algebraic thinking.  For more information about the conference, visit the SDE website

http://sde.com/singapore-math2014/Presenters.asp 

Singapore Math and Flipped Learning

Theresa and Stacye approached me and asked how I felt about flipped learning.  I love the idea in principle but wasn't sure about how it would work with second graders.  Especially since they're also adopting Math in Focus this year.  It seems like a lot to tackle all at once.  But if they were game, so was I, and I agreed to help them on their journey.  Now, we're four months into the experiment and things seem to be going really well.  I've talked to parents, other teachers, the principal and everyone is enthusiastic.  I've even heard from other schools that they're using the videos in class for their students and to train teachers.

What really blew me away was when I went to do some model drawing in another second grade class, who are also part of the journey.  We'd drawn a model and were ready to subtract 179 from 603.  Buck raised his hand and asked if they should use compensation subtraction, open number line, or traditional algorithm.  Whoa!  Turns out an unexpected side benefit is children learn more vocabulary from watching the videos repeated times.  I asked Buck which method made more sense to him.  He said, "I like traditional, but compensation makes more sense because there's a zero."

Theresa and Stacye will be presenting a session on Flipped Learning at our National Conference on Singapore Math this summer.  Registration is now open.  http://sde.com/singapore-math2014/  I can't wait to see what they have to say.