Student Work Blog: The Past Few Weeks in GLT

          Although my summative assessment of my unit plan was a reflection of where my students excel and where they still need work, I am able to see my third grade students’ growth throughout my unit (through formative and summative assessments). For example, I see many students understand what place value means and an example of place value. This is an important question because through this, I am able to see student thinking and understand how the students can explain what place value is in their own words. Not only do I understand that my students know how to explain place value, but I can see throughout my summative assessment they use their knowledge of what place value means in order to answer questions related to place value and think about how to solve a problem on a deeper level. 

            After evaluating my summative assessment of my unit plan, I am able to identify where my students need more support. My students still need work on rounding numbers and estimating sums and differences. During this part of my unit, I reflected that students did not understand the mathematical terminology sum and difference. Throughout the unit, I made a conscious effort to use these mathematical terms and reiterate and restate what they mean when using them. For example, on my student’s summative assessment, I noticed many of my third grade students were still unsure of what difference means (and in many cases, to subtract the larger number first). 

            On day three of my unit, I gave my students an exit slip as a formative assessment. While reading through exit slips and my summative assessment, I found student work that showed me my students started to master addition with regrouping. Through student work, I am able to better understand that not only do the students know how to solve an addition with regrouping problem numerically, but they understand how to physically represent the value (to further show they understand what “carrying” the one really means and how it is physically represented). Although many of my students have shown understanding for this concept, I would like to ask my students further questions such as: What does the one mean when you "carry" it? How can we represent this physically?