Chesney 1 Amber Chesney Diane Weaver 14 May 2013

Math Lesson Reflection Description: This was an informal math lesson taught to an individual student who is in third grade. Based upon the results of the students pretest, he has difficulties with subtracting three digit numbers. When doing these types of problems, he sometimes subtracts the smaller number from the larger number regardless of where the numbers are placed in the problem and has issues with zeros. In order to remediate this students difficulties, I chose to teach him how to do three digit subtraction problems using base ten blocks. I began the lesson by assessing his knowledge of the base ten blocks and then moved into teaching him how to use them for these types of subtraction problems.

Impact: For this lesson, I was unsure about the students strength in using base ten blocks. His teacher had told me that they had used them very little and it had been a significant amount of time since they had been used. Because of this, I decided to do a little pre exercise worksheet about using the blocks to see if he had basic knowledge of the use of them. I can see how this would be a good thing to do prior to any lesson as a warm up and refresher for the students

Chesney 2 before going into the main lesson. This allowed me to determine how I would proceed next with the lesson or if I needed to spend more time on how to use the blocks. As the lesson progressed, I could see that my student had very little interest in using the base ten blocks and preferred to do the problems with pencil and paper only. When I would ask him questions about his thinking about a problem, he would look at his written computation instead of the manipulatives. I decided that it would be wiser to concentrate on the problems that had the zeros in them instead of going through the entire worksheet problem by problem. I had also planned on teaching the student how to represent the base ten blocks by drawing them on paper, but felt that the lesson had gone on long enough and could see that my student was done. I feel that the addition of that part of the lesson would have been too much for him and was not a necessity at this point in the lesson. At the end of the lesson, I had the student do a post test and gave him the option to use the manipulatives if he wanted to, which he chose not to use. After he finished the post test, I determined which problems he had gotten wrong, and then I had him do those problems again with the manipulatives. This resulted in him getting the correct answer to the problems he had done incorrectly. We discussed what he had done incorrectly in those problems. Initially, I had not planned on going over his post test answers and revisiting the ones he had done incorrectly. When he had finished the post test, I had the realization that going over the answers that he got incorrect and incorporating the manipulatives would be an important way to close the lesson and reinforce what he had learned in the lesson. At this point, I ended the lesson and thanked him for working so hard.

Chesney 3 Intent: I feel that this lesson was fairly successful and that my confidence may have improved slightly. There were times that I felt like I was struggling in my explanation to the student, and think that that may be due to inexperience in teaching the lesson. For this lesson, I had enough activities planned, so that if my student was showing mastery at what I was teaching, I could redirect the lesson into something that would have been more challenging. The biggest thing I learned from this lesson was about reading my student for their understanding and feelings about the lesson. I could tell he did not want to do the problems with the base ten blocks and so I altered my lesson to only concentrate on the problem areas. I had felt strongly about my student doing both problems he struggled with and those that were easier in order for him to experience some successes. I determined that that was not necessary and so I concentrated on the problems I knew he would have difficulty with. This turned out to be the better decision and I learned that it is ok to deviate from the lesson plan that I have written in order to make it the best and most meaningful lesson for the student.