Combined Grade Easy!

Andrea teaches a combined 4/5 class.  She is really lucky because her team was able to work their LOI position to help break the combined grade down into single grade periods for part of the day.  Each day Andrea gets to have 1 period with just the grade 4s and 1 period with just the grade 5s (They go off to Science/social studies during that period).  This has helped her to meet the needs of her class because she is able to teach math to them in both a combined grade and single grade setting.

Her class is currently studying multiplication and division.  For this lesson, the students would only be focusing on multiplication.  Andrea wanted to do a lesson where the students would have the opportunity to not only practice this skill, but also see that there are different strategies that they can use to help them solve these types of questions.  She decided to do her lesson as Bansho to help the students see all of the different strategies that the class was able to come up with.  Her lesson started with the whole class, then it was just the Grade 4s and then it was just the Grade 5s.

She started her lesson with the whole group by highlighting the learning goals and success criteria:

The students then did a math string to help draw out the strategies that they were currently using.  They were asked to mentally solve the problem first, and then do a turn and talk with their partner.  To help slip in some accountable talk, they they had to share what their partner's strategy was for solving the problem.

You can see how some students did multiplication by skip counting, or by using known facts to help them break the problem into smaller chunks.  Others used the "traditional" way of multiplying.  She even introduced them to the area model to show them a different perspective.

When the Grade 5 students left, the Grade 4s were given their problem and solved it.  What was interesting was that in terms of strategies, the Grade 4 students had many more strategies to draw upon that the Grade 5 students.  As a class they found this kind of interesting.

Here are the problems that they completed:

Here is what their different strategies were.  These pictures are of the whole group, not just the Grade 4 or Grade 5 work.  The strategies are broken out into very distinct groups.  There could have been a few that were grouped together, but Andrea wanted to stress to the group that there are multiple ways of getting an answer, and that all of them are correct - but we can all learn a new strategy in the process.



Once the students were done, they had a class discussion as to what strategy they would try next time and why.  It was interesting to hear from them what their "a-ha" moments were and what they took from seeing the strategies.  Here is what the lesson looked like as a Bansho when it was fully completed:

Another great example of how to multiply in more than just one way.