Introductory entry

My name is Jen Farrell. I am enrolled at LIU Brentwood and I am taking EDI 601 with Dr. Schneiderman. This is my first blog. I have just begun my feldwork. My first day was in a fifth grade classroom. I observed the beginning of the day and the daily routing and I observed a mathematics class. The teacher reviewed place value. She used a sheet with a large box with gridlines to represent 1.0 and had the children  outline it. She then had them outline what would represent 1 tenth, hundreth and thousandth. She then had them do a really interesting excerice with  a bag of manipulatives. They got together in groups of 3, one child would be a "arranger"  who would pick several peices and the next child would be a "writer" who would write down the value of the arrangement in both word and standard form. The third child would be the checker to make sure they matched. They then took turns. It was fun for the kids because they would try to trick each other with harder and harder values.  The teacher followed up with a homework sheet that had place value equations. Intersting to see how quickly some picked it up and others struggled. Looking forward to going back to the classroom.