Clip 11/11: Adding and Subtracting with Money Post-Lesson Debrief

Overview

Katy reflects on the lesson, identifying elements that surprised her, specifically regarding the strategies the students used in the problem. She praises the pair that used an inverse operation to check and correct their work, another group that checked their sums as they added, and a third group that drew models of the place-value blocks that they used.

Teacher Commentary

My next steps would definitely be honing in more on the subtracting across zeros, maybe even teaching a smaller mini-lesson specifically on that. Although we’d done a lot with that, it might benefit the students. There was one student who was struggling with that, but when he used the place-value blocks, he was more able to conceptualize the numbers, taking those numbers away, as opposed to just sticking with the algorithm. Another thing we might work on is a strategy of how to take a big, huge equation and break it apart into smaller chunks to make it a more manageable math equation for them.