Time Goes By So Quickly

Kristen decided to begin her unit on Measurement by starting with teaching them time.  Since there are only a few days before March Break she figured it was something that could be easily covered, and would not be hindered by the week off school.  This was her second lesson on elapsed time.  It was part of our FOS PLCs.  Therefore we did the lesson as a lesson study.

The minds on was giving the students a problem about finishing chores in time to watch a favourite t.v. program.  The students did a think-pair-share and also used the accountable talk strategy of repeating (in their own words) a strategy of someone else.  Here were three answers that were given:

Kristen then gave the students the problem.  It was taken from the curriculum document. 

They were reminded to check the Success Criteria before and after they started to make sure they were not missing any important pieces in their final answer.

Just before the consolidation, the teachers came together and decided what groups should present their work during the congress.  Three groups were chosen because they had done different strategies that were interesting and unique.  Some of the groups even tried to show their answer in more than one way just to see if they could. 

The teachers then left the classroom and headed back to the staff room to debrief.  They talked about making the action more of a parallel task where the students could chose between this problem and one that used slightly different numbers (e.g., ones that ended in 7, or 6) to allow for some DI for the class.  The group also talked about what some next steps could be for the class in the upcoming days to either help them build upon the concept of elapsed time, or to do as a culminating task.

The group broke into smaller groups to give some descriptive feedback to the students.  Here are some of their comments:

A Bansho was then created with all of the student work to showcase the different strategies that were used to solve the problem.  The group had some really rich conversations about the strategies and when to push students to try new strategies, and when to let them keep using a specific strategy.  Even in grouping the work for the Bansho, some of the work samples we felt could still be moved around and new groups could be formed, or bigger groups could be made.  Here are pictures of the finished Bansho and also of the specific groupings.

Strategy: Using words

Strategy:  Adding the times together.

Strategy:  Adding, but converting the units from minutes to hours and minutes.

Strategy:  Using a number line.

Strategy:  Writing out the time that each activity was finished in a "number line" type fashion.  These two pieces caused quite  a discussion in the group as we were not quite 100% sure where to put them...Are they just like a number line?  Are they something more?  Something less?

It was a great professional afternoon full of ideas, discussions, and rich learning for both the students and the teachers.  I highly recommend you take the opportunity to visit a demonstration classroom and be apart of a lesson study.  If you need help in finding one, please let me know and I will see what I can do.