Rationale
It is imperative, for this particular group of students, to gain a year or more worth of growth in order to remain competitive among their peer group. As their upcoming fifth grade teacher, I have been given this charge. It is for this reason that I applied to the National Teachers Institute. Enhancing a teacher's structural knowledge will enhance their students' conceptual understanding. I strongly believe that one must recognize and resolve one's own shortcomings in order to best serve students.
2013- 2014 was Pennsylvania's last year for teachers to teach and students to be tested on the Pennsylvania State Standards. We are now to fully implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Common Core Practices. In fifth grade, the CCSS are inundated with all matters encompassing fractions: adding, subtracting, creating equivalent, comparing and ordering, multiplying, dividing, solving fraction word problems, solving mixed numbers word problems using any one of the four operations, and scaling. In contrast the P.A. Standards expectation was for students to order and add fractions with unlike denominators with one denominator being the given common denominator. Fairly mundane compared to the new charge. Both concepts could be, and more often than not were, taught through a set of procedures. Studies indicate that young students consistently fail to develop a deep facility in the fraction concept, despite its importance in daily life and higher level mathematics. This lack of conceptual understanding hinders the later development of fraction computation and problem- solving ability. 3 Accordingly, this unit will be devoted to developing my students understanding of and skill with fractions.
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