Math Professional Workshops

 I am very fortunate that my school district invests in training teachers. For the past two school years, we have had optional professional workshops in the winter and summer. There are multiple days with choices available for different grade levels. Last year, they were all separated by grade band. This year, there's more overlap between the grade levels on different days. So yesterday was 3-6, today was 4-6, and tomorrow is 6-8. I didn't realize that I could have also gone yesterday, but it worked out anyway because yesterday was my own kids' first day of the second semester. 

I am so glad they made the switch, because previously there was minimal involvement from people at my middle school, and we are the only middle school in the district. So today I got to work with not just teachers from my school, but from all of the elementary schools. It always helps to have additional perspectives from both sides. It also helps that everyone who was there signed up to be there.

Even though I've been to every workshop Jen has put on, I come away learning something and with something to do in my class that I wasn't before. 

I don't have everything that we did, because I was engaged, but I did take notes to remind myself of some of the things we did. Our topic was fluency with fractions and decimals in the morning, and it was so good because for a long time in my district, people have said that you should teach decimals and fractions separately, and for a long time, our students have struggled with both. But we started with writing as many expressions as we could for a whole number, which we then started doing different operations and then with fractions. I really liked this because we are starting our unit on expressions on Monday, so this is a great activity to do with my students next week. She also mentioned that decimals are technically called decimal fractions, which blew my mind. I looked up the definition and wrote it in my notebook as well, because I wanted to remember that. I had no idea that that was the case, and I got a math degree! 

I was also very glad that we have quite a few new teachers at the middle school this year who signed up for these workshops as well, including two of my partner teachers, so we were able to discuss and collaborate, with intentions of doing more tomorrow. It's awesome because we never have the time to plan together so I'm glad we have that to get a good start on the semester. It also helped me since I've been gone for almost 3 months to talk to a teacher who has been in my room with my students to see what they've been struggling with to help me prepare for returning to students on Monday.

In the afternoon we did a lot of operation work with both decimals and fractions, with base ten blocks, the area model, and a rekenrek. I've used rekenreks before during my summer professional development, but never seen how they could be used for decimals. My partner teacher said she used similar things at the high school level to help students with special needs and that it really helped them understand the concept. What's cool is she mentioned that you can add an abacus as an accommodation on state testing! Super good reason to do this kind of work with students, if it can help them understand and add a hands-on tool during testing.

I feel like there's a lot more to say but I'm tired. Today was a good day, but I used my brain a lot more than I have in a while!