My continuing Fosnot Adventure

For the past few weeks the blog has fallen silent. The Picture you see here is one I found when I did a search for "lost" at flickrcc. I seem to be struggling with the idea of slow learning. Doing the Fosnot Math is taking lots of time. A book that is supposed to be done in 10 days took over 4 weeks. The second unit is taking just as long. But the students are starting to take responsibility for their work and learning. They have completed their first growing post at their class blogs;

• Room 816
• Room 817
• Room 841
• Room 873

The students were highly successful using clocks to add fractions. Here is a voicethread I made in the summer for using clocks to teach the adding of fractions.

Now we are using Money to add fractions and playing with ratio tables. Fractions are such a large part of next years math that I am willing to spend a third of the school year teaching them. I hope they stick with me.

I have had issues marking and assessing the learning for these units and have come to the realization that the Growing Post is one easy way to see how what they have learned. Now we will journal old school in our notebooks and put the highlights of what we have learned in a new growing post. I had the students learn to upload a picture from their harddrive and to bring one in from flickr. They had to reflect on their learning from the first unit and most students participated. I hope they do as well the second time around.

Now that the students have a firm grasp on moving around the blog I will start Scribe posts. When I first attemped this the students did not know what they were supposed to do and just used the slides from the class smartboard as the scribe. I will still post the slides to slideshare but make the students recreate their math using paint or sketchcast.

Another thing for the students to start. Oh yeah we will start eportfolios in the next 2 weeks. Hmm more work for these poor students. They love it.

And to my friends and network in my google reader. I will now start to go attack the backlog of posts that I have not read for too many weeks. Thanks for your patience.