Perimeter, Area, Volume, and All That: A Study of Measurement

Academic context and learners

I teach 3rd-grade Mathematics at Zarrow International School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Zarrow is a public magnet school that provides language immersion instruction in Spanish. The school’s staff includes teachers and teacher assistants from different Spanish speaking countries as well as English native speaking teachers. The current student population is about 500 students from pre-k to 5th-grade.⁷ The school admits students based on an electronic, random lottery-selection by geographic quadrant for families living within the Tulsa Public Schools boundaries to give students from all areas of Tulsa equal access to the program. The process also provides for a sibling preference to encourage family engagement with the school community. However, the sibling preference policy is not a guarantee of admission to the school, for siblings do not participate in the lottery with non-sibling new students.⁸ The school receives additional funds through the local Zarrow Foundation and school Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). Parent involvement is among the highest in the district.

Based on the school profile data published by our district, the student ethnic composition is as follows:

About 30 % of the students are gifted, 12 % are English Language Learners, and 7 % are students with disabilities. 56 % of the students are female, and 46% are male.⁹ There are three classrooms at each grade level. Each class has a certified Spanish/English bilingual teacher and a Spanish native speaking teacher assistant. Instruction is delivered self-contained in grades pre-K to 2^nd and departmentalized by content area in grades 3rd to 5th. I teach 3rd-grade Mathematics to all 3rd graders at Zarrow (72 students). I deliver instruction mainly in Spanish using Eureka Math, supplemented with a computer-based program in English (Zearn). In addition to the Math teacher, the 3rd-grade team includes a Language Arts teacher and Science/Social Studies teacher, all of whom regularly collaborate through cross-curricular units. Our primary goal is to provide opportunities for developing students’ critical thinking skills regardless of abilities and learning styles. All these opportunities also promote second language acquisition more organically because the students learn and use the target language (Spanish) through experimentation and discovery.

I intend to teach this unit to enrich the academic content knowledge of my students during mathematics instruction in 3rd grade.